The Unexpected Parent

One windy day, in the architraves of San Sebastian, I was walking with my grandmother, Ellekah Mae, clutching my arm as she sometimes did when she felt weak or tired. She smiled at me, telling me my hair was almost as black as the rest of my siblings, my mind almost as sharp. Pausing on the bridge over the river Urumea, she looked down and muttered something under her breath about:

“nothing unwanted has a heart of gold.”

She had been acting strangely all day. I didn’t have the chance to ask what she meant about ‘nothing unwanted’, as suddenly a man limped through the tourist throng towards us. He was wearing scuba gear, and was dripping wet, panting. When he reached my grandmother, he kicked off his flippers and handed her a plastic container. My grandmother, shocked, her arteries clogged from our recent order of paella, fell backwards on the bridge. I tried to catch her, but she slipped past me, knocking her head on the railing and then hard on the flagstones below.

“NO!” I shouted. Blood gushed from a cut at the back of her skull. I knelt beside her in shock, holding her hand. I knew she was dying. Looking around in horror, I realised the man in scuba gear had vanished. A crowd of tourists encircled me and someone phoned an ambulance, shouting at them to hurry up. Like a ghost rising, my grandmother’s eyes flicked open, locking on mine.

“You are worthy,” she whispered.

Then she lay back, exhausted.

Later, while a medic worked on her in vain, I opened the plastic container the man had given her. Inside was a notebook, damp yet protected by its hard embossed cover. I flicked it open and saw many names recorded on the pages, all with lines through them. Right at the end was my grandmother’s name, ‘Ellekah Robinson, 3 Tueselin Square’. There was a heavy cross through it. Beneath her name, the list continued. The next one was ‘Max Amsterdam, 91 Cloudskin Alley’. I gasped. Max was a beloved primary school teacher I knew well. He lived at the back of the alleyway near my brother and taught my niece this year. What could this mean? I searched through the rest of the pages until I came across a sentence on the very last one:

‘Kill the next in line, or it will become your time. If you do, more money will come. Just leave this box where it came from.”

I dropped the notebook in shock. Kill the next in line? Who was that scuba diver? Had he meant to frighten my grandmother to death? How had she become mixed up in this list of annihilation? Ellekah had always been a quiet, unassuming old woman, a wife before that, a mother to her daughter, my own mother who had sadly died. She was anxious yes, and had trouble sleeping, but why should anyone want her dead? And Max? The only one who took in kids whose parents never paid the school fees? He let them board at his house during exam time. There could be no better teacher, surely? I quickly replaced the notebook in the container but noticed it had another compartment beneath. Sliding it open, I cried out. It was stacked to the brim with $100 bills – $20,000 worth! A bounty, especially since my father refused to pay me any stipend, like my brothers.

I stood aside from my family at my grandmother’s funeral. A few of them still blamed me for not catching her on the bridge. Or perhaps they had always stood apart from me, treating me as though I never fit in. I told none of them about the container of money or the notebook of names. At the back of the funeral parlour, I saw a few of Ellekah’s old school friends, an ex-boyfriend who she’d once turned down, wearing a new, expensive white suit, odd for the occasion. When he saw me he looked away. Only when I sought him out later I noticed the limp.

And Max Amsterdam. I had a jolt when I saw him. Come to pay his respects as a pillar of the community. He smiled when my niece turned around to shyly wave at her teacher at the back. The notebook started to burn a hole in my pocket.

Three of my siblings and my father carried my grandmother’s coffin outside, and as they did, one brushed past me, nearly knocking me to the ground. He didn’t apologise. My father even laughed. It was not a rare thing and I let it pass. In fact, I hung back until the funeral parlour had all but cleared. Then I went to the front where my grandmother’s portrait was placed high up on an easel. Her brown eyes stared at me, not particularly happy, in fact her smile was wary. And that was when I remembered. Cloudskin Alley. The place Max lived, where the poor students boarded. My mother had been a teacher before I was born, and once delivered books and supplies to help them. She never went down there again. “You will never go there,” she once said, “no matter what, he will never know you.” My grandmother refused to ever walk anywhere near that way too, even though it was a shortcut to my brother’s house.

San Sebastian was turning gold as the sunset lit up the sky. I walked up behind him where he was standing on the steps. The crowd now thinned out. It was as windy as the day I’d walked with my grandmother on the bridge. Without thinking, I suddenly placed the flat of my hand on his arm and pushed him sideways. It was a quick, undetected movement in the breeze, but he fell. No one was ready to catch him. He tumbled over the railing and onto the street below. A similar rivulet of blood ran from a cut on the back of his head.