I had pinched a blue notebook with fine paper made in Paris from my father’s store. If anyone noticed they didn’t say so, although my father’s clerk, Mr. Enrique, a stern, handsome man, looked at me differently after that. The first story I wrote down was one the old ladies told about a woman who’d given birth to a turtle. They liked to take turns when they told it, so that each storyteller added a detail or two. The woman who was the turtle-girl’s mother was so stunned by the green shell surrounding her baby that she ran down to the beach and left the newborn by the shore. She meant to desert the child and let it be taken out to sea with the tide, but luckily, a mother turtle with a nest of hatchlings was nearby and she raised the turtle-girl as her own. Jestine and I always searched for a turtle that was half human, with a human face and soul. She was said to have grown to be a woman who looked like any other, with long arms and legs and moss-tinted hair. You couldn’t see her shell unless she was in the sea. She could have easily disguised herself and joined our world, eating in cafés, dancing with men who found her beautiful, but instead she’d chosen to live in the world of the turtles. If you happened upon her you would see that her skin was a pale green and her eyes were yellow. She had swum to every gleaming sea in the world, but always came back to our shore.
We are here, Jestine and I whispered as we stood on the beach. O Sister, we called. We would not forsake her or judge her if only she would show herself to us. But she never did, no matter how late we stayed, even when we waited until the last of the turtles had returned to the bay. It was clear that Jestine and I were as uncomfortable as the mysterious turtle-woman when in the company of humans. Jestine was especially shy, perhaps because she was so beautiful her mother had warned her not to be too friendly to the boys and men who might approach her. As for me, I was distrustful by nature. The two of us roamed the island as if there was no one else in the world. We would collect buckets of hermit crabs and ghost crabs and race them against one another in the sand before setting them free and watching them scramble away from us as if we were monsters.
Sometimes I was forced to bring along my younger cousin Aaron Rodrigues, who lived with us. There were three years between us and he was nothing but an annoyance to me. I was told his parents had been lost in a storm when he was little more than a baby and afterward our family had taken him in. My mother preferred him, even though he wasn’t related to us by blood, perhaps because of the baby boy she lost. Girls were not worth very much in her eyes, especially a disobedient girl such as myself. Aaron was handsome, dark, with startlingly pale blue eyes. Even as he grew older, my mother still enjoyed showing him off to her friends, especially the formidable Madame Halevy, whose stern presence intimidated us all but who melted whenever she saw Aaron. Mon chouchou, she called him, even when he was a rowdy boy of nine. Mon petit canard. In return I pinched Aaron and called him a duck in English, not such a pretty word. He always gave me a wounded look, though he didn’t complain. I should have been guilt-ridden, but suppose I was a brutal girl. I knew what happened in fairy tales. The strong survived while the weak were eaten alive.
On nights when I was forced to look after Aaron, I gave him over to Jestine, who was more kindhearted than I. Perhaps because he was an orphan and Jestine had no father, she could feel compassion for him, even though he was a wild boy, who delighted in leaping from cliffs. I took to scaring him to get him to behave. He was terrified of werewolves, half-human beasts that were said to reside on the old plantations. My father had assured me these were made-up stories, used by the plantation owners to frighten slaves from running away. There is the outside of a story, and there is the inside of a story, he told me as we sat in his library one afternoon. One is the fruit and may be delicious, but the other is the seed.
By now my father had decided I’d had enough of fairy tales and was too old for such notions. Perhaps my mother had complained to him or perhaps he thought I should be more serious or maybe he simply longed for the son he’d lost and wished to educate me in the way he would have had I been a boy. Monsieur Pomié was a respected member of the Burghers’ Association, the businessmen’s society that one must join to be a merchant, in my father’s case, a shop owner who exported rum and sugar and molasses. Aaron was fated to take over his business, since girls and women could not inherit property, but perhaps my father hoped those laws would change. He began to teach me figures, so I would understand the ledgers in the store, and I was honored to be educated in a way few girls were.
All the same, I wrote down the werewolf tale the way I’d heard it from our cook, Adelle. She had told us that the werewolves were members of the old Danish families who owned slaves. Their transformation was God’s punishment for their wrongdoings. You could spy their teeth and claws at night, even when they were in their human guise, so they often wore gloves and scarves, even in the hottest times of the year. If you see such a thing, Adelle told us, run.