Commotio Cordis

Pria Anand

In June, Lydia turned seven, and her father bought her a blue bicycle. He shipped it on the catamaran from the mainland, and she rode it up and down the shallow hill beside her house, past the cemetery and around the bend to his store, leaning forward on the handlebars and spinning the pedals faster than they could catch the wheels while her mother watched anxiously from the porch.

At seven, Lydia had wide eyes and a high forehead that curved like a sugar mango. The bigger children played marbles with a circle in the dust in front of the store, and when she passed on the bicycle, they yelled, “where’s the moon, Lyd?” and she covered her forehead with her short fingers splayed. They teased her because she showed off, biking in wobbly circles beside the road, leaning wider and wider until her training wheels scraped the ground.

In the shade on the porch, Lydia’s father played cards with her uncles and her cousin Carlos over a wide wooden barrel stood on its end. Sometimes, Lydia dropped her bike in the dust and hid from the children behind Carlos’s legs. She would cry on purpose, crumpling her face and rubbing her dry eyes and gasping between her words, her hands cupping the backs of Carlos’s calves, and he would murmur, “Who did what, Lyd?” as he played his cards.

The men bet loose change and rounds of beers, but each night, they left the pot for the next night, and Lydia’s father never collected on the beers, and so money never changed hands. Instead, the games were punctuated by sated mosquitoes slapped in the growing dusk, leaving tiny, bloody stains that Lydia could count from her seat behind Carlos’s legs. They were punctuated by the crack of her father’s fist against the barrel when he lost.

Most mornings, Lydia’s father was gone by the time she awoke, opening the store with the sun, or on the boat to the mainland, buying cases of beer and soda to stock the metal racks behind the open store window. June was Carnivale, and he bet on the Carnivale races, on the cat boats that slowly circled the island, their sails sagging in the hot, still air, and on the horses running the curve of the beach. He worked through the races, at the store or on the mainland, and he placed his bets with his brothers, who never worked, who drank beers from the store and watched every race and fought over every bet.

He bought the bicycle with his winnings, and Lydia rode it to the store and waited for dusk so she could crouch behind Carlos’s legs and watch her father play.

The day the rain started, Lydia saw it coming. In the morning, she ate johnnycake, dense and sweet, and watched the clouds pool low and dark around the base of the mountain through the open door. By noon, when the dented white pickup truck honked outside the school for the smallest children to crowd into the bed and go home, the fog had touched down on the land. And in the evening, as Lydia rode her bicycle to the store, the sky broke open.

Lydia was beside the cemetery then, and she left her bike on its side, wheels jutting into the road, to run in and wait under the narrow border of a tin mausoleum roof. The walls had been plastered over and painted with the names of the dead in uneven, curly print, beside crosses and stars, florid and misspelled. In front of her was the mango tree, massive and dark. The trunk had fallen sideways in a past storm, before Lydia was born, but it had sprouted new roots along its length, laying flat and sending its branches skyward. She watched clusters of tiny, overripe mangoes drop from the tree like wind chimes, the rocky ground gouging holes in their soft sides. The wind plucked one whole, perfect mango, still firm and green, and Lydia willed herself to remember where it fell.

Her mother never ate mangoes from the cemetery, frightened of what it might mean to steal fruit from the dead, but they were sweeter than the others, and Lydia ate them in secret, sucking the flesh off the pit and tonguing the strings it left between her teeth

In the rain, it smelled of mangoes, of sweetness and ferment, and when the downpour paused, Lydia ran into the wet grass to gather them up, rolling each one over to look for ants, for bruises, for flaws. There were three that had not yet split open, and she hid these under her shirt, wrapping them in the hem, fat droplets of sticky juice leaking out from beside the stem and disappearing into her rain-soaked shirt. She could hear her mother wail for her by the house and she ran out through the open gate, cupping the mangoes between her hands and leaving her bike behind. Later, after her mother bathed her in hot water scooped from a bucket, Lydia ate all three, tiptoeing to the door to rinse the sticky sheen from her cheeks in the rain.

It rained without respite for three weeks. At first, the water seemed to slick things down—rough cement and fallen leaves and tall grass laid on its side. Then, it pulled things up, out of storm drains and ditches, roiling dark with floating carrion and oily dirt and once, a neighbor swore, a live bonefish, swimming confused circles in the drowning street.

The gullies that carried rainwater to the sea filled up until they stood still, hatching tadpoles that darted like dark commas through a reef of sunken beer bottles. The crabs, ashore to shed their shells, learned to climb houses in search of higher ground, clattering on rooftops and scraping against patio tiles.

Motorcycles crashed in the rain, ghosting around full potholes with broken lights in the wet evening dark, and a crowd would gather outside the tiny hospital, eerie and silent, motorcycles and bicycles all facing the door, to wait for the news—a leg broken in three, a jaw split in two.

The night the rain started, they named the queen of Carnivale. The rain pounded the tin roof of the coliseum until it drowned out the band. It needled in between the wide slats, scaring woodlice out of the walls and onto the stadium seats. The crowd, which had been plastered against the windows to catch some breeze, grabbed at beers and empanadas and surged towards the stage in a confusion of bare legs and forgotten purses.

While teenagers were still filtering into the coliseum, flooded from their outdoor parties, Lydia’s mother May was asleep next to her husband. May, the daughter of two first cousins, one of whom was the daughter of two first cousins, had been born deaf, unable to hear even motorcycles passing in the street until they sped into the corner of her eye and threw her off balance. That night, she woke to the feeling of thunder shaking her chest while her husband, a man who could always hear Lydia’s bare feet on the concrete porch when she snuck out at night, slumbered on. When she slept again, May dreamt that the island had filled with water so high that the house had floated over the hill and out to sea.

Lydia dreamt, too. She dreamt of Carnivale, of the motorcade, motorcycles without mufflers and pickup trucks hung with paper cutouts circling the island. In her dream, the candidatas for queen waved at her from the backs of motorcycles and rolled their hips in pickup beds, dressed in soft ruffles and skintight gold lame. That day, she had been in the old taxi with her father, driving to town to get gas for the stove, but in her dream, she stood by the road when the motorcade passed. In her dream, she felt the sound of the engines vibrate her ribs like so many bees until she was sure her bones would snap. In her dream, the motorcade passed so quickly that her shirt billowed up from her stomach and she fell backwards into the bush.

In the morning, the rain had lightened. From the house, Lydia could hear the tinkling pop-pop of toads in the gullies, the sound of overblown bubbles. Lydia’s father had left for the boat, and May was in the kitchen, bent over a basket of green plantains. Lydia wandered in, stomping one leg in front of herself and dragging the other behind until May felt the floor vibrate under her feet and turned. May gestured at the plantains and pointed west, stroking a finger across her upper lip and up into the curve of her smile. These plantains were from the neighbor’s tree—not the one with the sad face and the goatee, but the one with a curling moustache and no beard at all.

“Horse race today,” Lydia said, her hands rising and falling in front of her like a jockey’s on the neck of her imaginary mount. Her father had bet on the race, she knew, and Carlos was riding.

May squinted at Lydia. She pointed at the basket, mimed peeling the plantains with both hands, slicing them and frying them, her hands shaking over the stove like plantains popping in the hot oil. She drew the back of her hand across her forehead and sighed. She had work to do.

“Aunty selling crab rice on the beach,” said Lydia, cupping a hand in front of her stomach for her aunt’s pregnant belly and running one finger up the inside of the other forearm for their shared blood, “and horse race today.” Lydia had seen one of the horses before, the roan from town, Carlos’s mount. The roan ran in a high, rocky field in front of the school, and once, at midday, during the siesta, when only Lydia was watching, he bent his front knees, planted one hoof after the other in the ditch that drained water to the road, and slid under the wire fence.

Before he’d cantered down the street in front of the mayor’s office, before the boys had chased him down and tied a rope behind his ears to lead him back, before he’d shied and scared Lydia’s drunk neighbor on his moto off the road and through the window of the miscellany caribe store, he’d stood in the street, his sides rising with damp air and his nostrils wide as sand dollars. Lydia waited beside him in the heat of his body, her hand planted in the center of his chest, his ears pricked towards her.

“Come,” Lydia said. “You can make plantains tomorrow.” She pulled at May’s skirt. “Come on. It’s Carnivale.” Lydia laid one hand on her chest and held the other up, palm facing her mother. She stepped forward, twisting back and forth at the waist, the way she’d seen her father do when he teased May to come dance with him at the Carnivale parties.

Sometimes, just before Lydia was born, before her husband opened the store, May had danced, painting on eyebrows and lipstick and moving to a beat that pulsed from speakers as tall as a man and wide as two and shook the air around her. To Lydia, though, she rolled her eyes. She set down the plantains and mimed Carnivale, pulling her bent arms back and thrusting out her chest, waving with one hand like the candidatas, buzzing her lips, voo, voo, frantic, like the Carnivale parties. She shook one finger in the air and turned away. Not for me.

Lydia stomped again. She crumpled her face and rubbed her dry eyes and gasped between her words, the way she imagined she did when she cried for real—“The horses, mama!”—until May closed her eyes and nodded.

It was almost noon by the time they caught a lift. The passing motos were already laden with entire families, with teenagers riding sidesaddle and baby daughters in freshly braided hair and pink ruffles sitting wide-eyed on their fathers’ laps, all headed to the beach to see the race. On the hill outside the house, the motorcycles stalled under the weight, returning to the bottom to start again. May hissed and called and waved from the porch. Her voice warbled, deep and round, consonants rising from the back of her throat and long vowels that rose and fell with her mood.

As the motos passed, Lydia gossiped about their passengers. That lady, the one from the mainland, she got five babies, she signed to May, puffing out her cheeks and lifting her arms from her sides for the woman’s girth, and that one, her daughter left for the States on an airplane that took off like Lydia’s flat hand curving up from the ground.

The first moto with room for them was a polished red scooter driven by their neighbor to the south, and May and Lydia ran up the street calling after it. When it finally stopped, May climbed on the seat behind her neighbor, one hand clutching her straw purse and the other holding on at his waist, and Lydia squeezed onto the platform between his feet and held the handlebars inside his hands. May was a heavy woman, and he drove slowly, the scooter rising and falling as if it were cresting a wave at every pothole.

Lydia could hear the music from the road, pumping out of speakers up on the sand and boomboxes on anchored launches in the bay. One year, she rode in her uncle’s launch, circling the island with the Carnivale party. It was storming then, and the boat had bounced and smacked on the choppy water, but Lydia had closed her eyes and held her breath, and didn’t get sick until she’d climbed back onto the dock and tipped her head to empty the hot seawater from her ears.

Motorcycles were parked at angles beside the sand path, and they’d strung tarps between the trees up on the beach to keep off the drizzle. People were drinking in the launches and under the tarps, beer—Aguila, sin igual, siempre igual—and bush liquor. Lydia could see two horses down the beach, waiting in a corral of woven branches, grazing on long cut grass strewn on the sand. The roan was outside, tied to a tall palm by a rope around his neck and watching the sea.

May held Lydia’s hand, and they crossed the party.

“May!” Lydia’s aunt called, kicking May’s ankle. “May, which horse you cheering?” She flipped her hands open in front of her in a question.

May smiled and shook her head and waved a finger in the air in front of her. She wasn’t— wasn’t betting, wasn’t cheering.

“I’m cheering the one from town,” Lydia said, but her aunt shook May’s shoulder, insistent. “Which, May? Which?” She flipped her hand open again.

May dropped Lydia’s hand and shook her head again. Her hands rode up and down in front of her for the horses, and she rubbed her thumb against her fingers and kissed her hand to the air. Her husband bet on the race, on the roan his little nephew Carlos was riding. She ran a finger along her face, in front of her left ear, for Carlos’s long scar, and pointed to Carlos, standing across the beach with the horses.

Freed from her mother’s grip, Lydia ran into the surf where the children were playing. The older children were out too far, resting their elbows on the rims of the anchored launches and twisting their arms like a champeta to the reggae. Lydia feared the current, the choppy waves stroked up by the wind, so she stayed in the shallowest part of the water by herself.

She squatted, the rain needling the water around her, watching the blue crabs float out of their burrows when the waves came in and slide back down when the sand dried, so fast she almost couldn’t tell where they had gone. She dug a pit with her fingers, scooping out furrows of sand as quickly as she could, but the crab was already buried, and its burrow had disappeared. She thought that maybe if she put her head under the water when the waves came, she could see the crabs emerge and follow them back into the wet sand.

Down the beach from Lydia, the horses were readied. They were fine-boned and dish-faced. They eyed the waves and sidestepped and pointed their noses to the sky, and the jockeys spun them in circles to keep them from bolting away from the water. The race was always run in the narrow strip between the loose sand up on the beach and the soft, treacherous mush under the sea, but in the rain, even this had softened, its edges eroding into the water.

When the horses started down the beach, Carlos was at the very back on the roan. No one had bothered to name his horse, but Carlos called him Tatu because that was his owner’s nickname, and because the horse, short and slight, looked like his owner. Carlos leaned up Tatu’s neck and laced his fingers into Tatu’s wet mane. In his right hand, he carried a leafy branch from the corral to swipe at Tatu’s rump if he slowed, but Tatu never slowed.

Carlos tried to hug Tatu’s sides, to drop his weight into his legs as if it would make them grow, as if his feet could touch under Tatu’s belly, but Tatu was galloping now, his head up and ears pinned back, his legs slapped by the waves. Carlos was bouncing, the muscles in his groin starting to ache. The palms of his hands were cramping in Tatu’s mane, and the rain was filling his eyes, and he couldn’t think except to pray he didn’t slide off.

Up on the sand, the adults saw the horses start to run, and they yelled for the children playing in the surf. May wailed for Lydia, and Lydia heard something, but it sounded deep and muffled and far away. Her head was under the water, and her eyes were stinging, and she couldn’t see the crabs.

She came up to breathe, and there were the horses, stomping the water until it churned. Lydia froze. They were there for a moment, and then she was behind them, the first horse almost at the end of the beach, then the second, their hooves pounding the sand between Lydia and the party.

But Tatu, Tatu was last, and Carlos was squinting against the drizzle, and he couldn’t see to guide his horse away from the soft footing under the water where Lydia squatted. Tatu’s stride was five times as long as Lydia, and his front feet passed over her head, and she could feel something sharp and cold part her hair. She held her breath as if her head were under the water. Tatu’s front hooves touched the sand, and his back heel caught Lydia’s chest as he launched himself forward again, and all she could feel was that she wanted to breath and couldn’t, that the front of her chest wouldn’t lift off of the back. Beneath Lydia’s ribs, the left ventricle of her heart had just closed in on itself, emptying its blood into the curve of her aorta. Lydia flew, and by the time her head thumped the dry sand up on the beach, she couldn’t feel anything.

Later, after the crowd waited outside the hospital for Lydia’s news, after she had learned to stand again, and walk, and lift her arms, and breathe, she rode the bicycle to her father’s store. In the months lying flat, she had grown taller; she had to bend her legs to fit the pedals, her knees jutting out to the sides like bony wings. It was dry by then, and her weight flattened the rubber tires into the rocky dirt of the road as she rose up the hill in choppy strokes and coasted down the other side.

She rode past the cemetery, past the rotten mangoes splitting in the sun between the graves, past the wet grass where the bicycle had lain since the first day of rain, blooming a fine powder of rust.

At the bottom of the hill, Lydia felt her scalp grow hot. Her vision began to dim, gray at the edges, then black. In her chest, Lydia’s heart skipped a beat, and she woke up on her side, the bicycle between her legs, a yellow bruise blooming under her chin.