I worked every day, from sunup to sundown—with short breaks for eating, jogs, and the occasional shower—but it still took me another full week to write the final childhood chapters.
As always, the best parts came at dawn. It was a Monday, or Tuesday—I didn’t know, I’d lost all track of time—when the last drops of nastiness poured out of me. The sun had risen above Bonny’s oaks, and I marveled over the pink-and-lavender show. I’d never seen a sunrise like it.
I composed an email to Asa and sent the pages rocketing into cyberspace. I crossed my fingers that they would be either so chilling or so pathetic, he’d drop the whole sex angle. I couldn’t deal with more questions about that. Or the threat of the ghostwriter conducting his own independent research.
This was my story. My story, my mother, my book. Period.
I showered and headed down to breakfast. Doro, dressed in nylon fishing shorts and a frayed denim work shirt, was on her way out. Two plastic baskets were hooked over each arm.
“Run to the kitchen, grab a croissant,” she said. “And a long-sleeve shirt. Your mother ever teach you how to bake a pie?”
I snorted. “I’ll give you one guess.”
“Go,” she said. “I’ll wait.”
Five minutes later, Doro and I were standing under the porte cochere off the side of the house, on the drive. I crammed one of Laila’s impossibly flaky, airy croissants into my mouth and then posed—arms out, eyes screwed shut—while Doro sprayed me down with her heavy-duty industrial-size can of bug spray. My bug bites burned like miniature erupting volcanoes all over my body.
“Agh.” I let out another muffled scream through the half-chewed croissant.
“Close your mouth.” She sprayed again.
“Get her good, Doro,” I heard. “They love the taste of her blood.”
I cracked open one eye. Koa slouched against a tabby post, holding a grass-coated weed whacker. His jeans looked like he’d slept in them, and a portion of his gnarled hair was tied up on top of his head. Annoying how good he made a man-bun look.
“Or you could do it the Caddo way,” he said.
Doro laughed and sprayed some more. “I don’t think Meg would like the Caddo way.”
My eyes met Koa’s for a brief second.
“Pie Night,” Doro said, still spraying away. “You got a big day?”
“List as long as my arm,” he said.
I coughed in the cloud of bug spray. “There was something making weird sounds outside my balcony last night,” I said.
“Sounds?” Doro asked.
“Thumps. Scrapes up along the wall.” I glanced from her to Koa.
“Oh, yeah. That’d be Cappie Strongbow,” he said.
“It was raccoons, probably,” Doro said, shaking her head. “Nothing to worry about. As long as your door is locked. Just lock your balcony door.”
“And say a protection prayer, maybe,” he added. “Just in case.”
“Stop it, Koa.” Doro put a hand on my sticky arm. “We’ve got work to do. See you around.”
“See you around,” he said.
As we headed into the woods, I threw a casual look over my shoulder. He was already at work, waving the weed whacker along the edge of the drive, a faded red bandanna pulled up over his nose and mouth.
“You gotten to know Koa at all?” Doro asked.
“Oh, no. Not really. He’s just . . .” I fell silent.
She dimpled. “You know, he’s not just pretty, he’s smart too. Did he tell you he was a physician’s assistant? He worked on the geriatric floor of a hospital in Texas before he came here to weed whack for me.”
Of course. All the medical supplies in his cabin. His way with the foal.
“Why did he leave Texas?”
“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him.” She elbowed me and cocked her eyebrow. “He’s a man of few words. And I think I’ve used up his quota with me.”
The slanting rays of the sun lit up the bleached white streaks in her hair. Her skin was the perfect shade of golden brown with a spray of freckles drifting across both shoulders. And there wasn’t a mosquito bite anywhere on her. Maybe she’d developed an immunity, living here all her life.
We were farther down the path now, and she pressed through a thick hedge. “The Guale people ruled this place once. They’d live on the island in the winter when the shellfish were in season, and then move over to the mainland to hunt or cultivate crops the rest of the year. Then the Spanish came, the Jesuits and Franciscans. Once the Guale figured out the priests wanted them to give up their seasonal relocating and tried to make them settle around the missions, they massacred them.”
“Yikes.”
“They stoned them, cut them into pieces. Put their heads on pikes outside the mission. The English came, the soldiers and pirates. That’s who the island is named after, you know—Anne Bonny, the most famous female Caribbean pirate. The Europeans brought weapons and disease and the tradition of scalping. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“True story. Eventually the Guale scattered inland and down to Florida. Their tribe—their culture, artifacts, language—it all vanished.”
Interesting. In Kitten, there was one family left with Guale blood: the Strongbows. And then there was Kitten, who imagined she was part of the tribe—but maybe Frances had made that part up, it was hard to tell. There was no rhyme or reason to Frances’s methods.
Doro went on to explain that Bonny was given as a royal land grant to one of her ancestors—Samuel Kitchens, a general in the British army. He was the one who built the original Ambletern in 1780 and carved out the plantation. There was a fire at some point, and the house was rebuilt in the 1880s. Somewhere in the ’40s, Doro’s grandmother turned the property into a hotel.
When she finished, I was quiet.
“What is it?” Doro asked. “Something I said?”
I shrugged. “It’s nothing.”
“You thought I would say I was Guale, didn’t you?” She looked back at me, her eyes lit with understanding. “You’ve been doing your homework, I see. Reading the book.”
I swallowed. Stepped over a puddle.
“That was just one of Frances’s many embellishments, Kitten imagining that she was Native. Frances made all that stuff up. I never said anything like that. I never believed I was Guale or thought I was adopted into any Native tribe.” Her voice sounded calm but I couldn’t see her face. I had no idea if she was angry or just explaining how things were. “Kim Baker, my friend who died, was Cherokee, I think. She and her mother came up from somewhere—Jacksonville, maybe—to work at Ambletern. But not me. I wasn’t Native, and I knew it.”
“Right,” I said. “Got it. Sorry.”
She went on, thrashing through the woods at a steady pace. I could barely keep up with her. “I don’t suffer any delusions; I know exactly who I am. I’m an immigrant. One hundred percent white imperialist, through and through. And I guess some people might call me crazy because I believe in the kooky notion that this island—this whole country, in fact—still belongs to Native people.”