11 45 Sunday Morning.

Around 6 this morning, well after the roosters have started reveille I finally fell asleep. When I woke at 9 30, I felt empty and hollow and my eyes were the hot and dry that comes with exhaustion. Every one was quiet, even in the kitchen which is usually the loudest room in any Jamaican household. Maybe we knew it was coming. Probably we were just all so very, very tired.

I had just finished sharing the events of last night with my mom when I heard a LORD JESUS, LORD JESUS HAVE MERCY. I have to go, I said, I think Mr Cotton’s finally passed.

There was a flurry, a gale of frantic pleas to the lord, which were too late. They would ebb and resurge, the whole family clustered in the doorway. All I could see were legs and feet wrapped in a white sheet on the bed. I retreated to kitchen.

I still had not seen Sister Betty, and no one was paying me any mind. I might as well have been a piece of furniture. Certainly I would have felt more at ease as a chair or coffee table, they have a place, they are wanted and needed in these sorts of situations. No one said, Miss Taylor, Cotton has died. Miss Taylor, are you alright? So I retreated to kitchen.

Sister Betty finally came in and went right to me and said “Miss T, Cotton’s gone” and put her arms around me and held me tightly. Not because I needed it, but because she did.

The house fills slowly with women. Some of them are teachers at the All Age school, and ask Miss Taylor, how you do? I’m alright I say.

I realize I’m in my pajamas still and there are strangers in the house and I need to put on a bra. I put on a bra. I put on clean underwear, a new shirt. I go back to the kitchen. I eat fried breadfruit. I do the dishes. There is nothing left for me to do. I go into my room, I close the door. No one will tell me what the appropriate thing for me to do is. How to be, who to be in the situation.

You need to get out of there, says Angie. I want to, I want to get in a taxi and go anywhere. St Ann’s Bay, Ocho Rios, be anywhere but at the nucleus of these urgent, grieving people. But I’m afraid of what they will think. For now, I’m forgotten, but how does it look if I slink out as everyone else is coming in?

I need to take a shower. I want a real, American shower. Hot torrents of water to wash the red out of my eyes instead of the two icy needles from my broken shower head. I want the water to drown out the shouts and prayers that reverberate around the house. I want to feel warm and scrubbed and clean.

I want to go to a movie theater and sit in the dark and eat popcorn and chase the salt with a large Diet Coke from the fountain and disappear into a louder world where no one has lost a brother, an uncle, a friend.

But all these wants will go unanswered: I can’t take a hot shower. I can’t go to a movie. I can’t do anything to help these grieving people.