Free Land of Love and Drowning: A Novel by Tiphanie Yanique Page A

nursery. This was not a thing that fathers did. He didn’t knock. He simply opened the door and there was Eeona sitting at the edge of the bed in her flowing nightgown. The hair on her head bursting around her like a halo. Owen would have stopped and run. Stopped and kneeled. Either one, if he were a lesser man or a better man. Instead: “I’ve tried other waters,” and he was walking toward her. “But I need,” and he was close to her now.
    Eeona stared at her father and did not move. What she missed those months in Tortola was here, but now she was afraid. “Papa,” she said, keeping her voice steady. Would he really own her now? With Mama just on the other side of the house? Would he not wait until they could sail away together? Leave Moreau and Antoinette the house and the Anegada golf course. Owen held his hand up flat, as if to say “Stop,” or as if to say “I praise you.” Instead: “I need you to marry this man and go away with him,” and then he shook his head as though he did not believe himself. “I alwayswanted Europe for you. They say there are others like you in Paris. Women of splendor. Your own beauty will not be such a burden.”
    “But Papa, there are no others like me.” She controlled her voice, for that, too, was part of her beauty. “Do not send me away, Papa.”
    “My own, I already have.” He turned to the door.
    The things in her that Eeona understood receded, the things in her that she did not understand seeped in—her episodes, they would be called later. “But Owen,” she said like a woman, “what about the silver? You always said it was yours.”
    Owen did not turn back to face her. Instead: “Your mother has almost finished your wedding dress.”
    Eeona stood up and embraced his back. He turned to her. Their faces too near. In this way he could not remain composed. In this way the woman whose lips were close could not have been his child. How could he send her away? The skin on his cheeks was tingling. He took her waist in his hands. “We have always known that this is not the way of a good father or of a good daughter,” he said.
    Eeona was barely a woman, really. She was a child. Her mind was storming. Would Papa kiss the silver? Right here in her mother’s own house? Eeona took his face in her palms, feeling her strangeness rising like a tide.
    Owen Arthur’s heart beat so slowly he thought he might die right there. “There is nothing good I can give you,” he said. “For your own sake. There can be no more of this.”
    Eeona’s heart beat so hard she could feel the pulse between her legs. “Then I wish you would die, Papa. I wish you would just die.”
    And then Owen, released as though from a shackle, streamed from the room.
    The telegram came the following evening: “
Homecoming
wrecked on Anegada reef. Two survivors. Captain not among them.”
    As simple as that.

17.
    The Homecoming
went down on a day that had been bright and young. What they said happened to the ship was something that could happen to any ship ringing the coral atoll of Anegada. Except that this captain knew Anegada well; after all, it was where he had found his wife.
    Every family of note from the U.S. Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands had a relation who went down with the ship. More than one family lost their breadwinner. More than one woman lost a lover. Eeona, still seventeen, lost both. Instead of planning a wedding, she helped her mother plan Papa’s funeral. Anette could not have understood, but still she played quietly, tending the doll her mother had made her. Feeding it, dressing it, holding it to her chest, putting it gently to bed. In general, giving it the love no one had time to give her those days.
    —
    The two deckhands who survived the wreck were pulled ashore by the lobstermen of Anegada. The deckhands told the stories of how in the past the captain had always sighted Anegada in the distance because he said it looked like the flat chest of a child