Boundaries Read Online Free Page A

expatriates had grown accustomed to spending lazy afternoons at the beach in the warmth of the tropical sun. They did not want to return to dark winter days and frigid nights.
    On TV, Anna once caught a glimpse of a grim-faced brown-skinned woman in her late seventies standing quietly on the sidelines of an anti-immigration rally in England. She was holding a sign that read: We are here because you were there .
    Anna chose America, land of immigrants, those willing and those ripped from their homeland in chains, a country where every living person, with few exceptions, can draw a straight line through ancestors not born here. Now, twenty years later, her mother will see where she lives in America. How she lives. And Anna panics.

THREE
    D r. Paul Bishop arrives on time to take Anna to dinner. At precisely six o’clock, he rings the bell on the stone wall that encloses the house where Anna’s parents live.
    It is a beautiful wall made of large sand-colored stones streaked with slate and some kind of metallic material that glints even in the softening sunlight of the late afternoon. John Sinclair scoured the island for these stones. He left much of the interior design of the house to his wife, but he had insisted on this stone wall. He had said he wanted to bring the beauty of the natural world into their home. In front of the stone wall he has planted six elegant royal palm trees. Their long, slim trunks rise gracefully to the sky like the elegant ringed legs of the scarlet ibis. At the tops, fronds form an umbrella, sheltering tiny red berries clustered in the cups of spidery brown stems. Every evening when the sun is low on the horizon, John Sinclair inspects these trees for rotting berries and fronds dangling by wispy brown threads torn away from the stems. He keeps score on his long-running competition with the gardener Singh on exactly what day the berries and fronds will fall to the ground. He usually wins and collects the fallen loot in a bundle by the gate as proof of his victory, not at all reticent to gloat when Singh arrives on his bicycle early the next morning to begin working on the gardening chores Beatrice Sinclair has left for him. It is these palm trees and the stone wall that Paul Bishop admires now, marveling at how beautifully they frame the house, how the mountains that face them rise like a curtain, blue against the darkening sky.
    Lydia, the Sinclairs’ helper, has pressed the button on the wall in the kitchen that releases the lock on the electric gate and it grinds open. It is an imposing gate. Thick white iron rods run vertically to the top, each one ending in a sharp spike. The Sinclairs have installed this gate to protect themselves from the rash of violent murders, kidnappings, and burglaries that have overtaken the island since South American drug lords turned the quiet fishing villages in the south into way stations where they can repackage their illicit cargo bound for the U.S. in the bellies of pirogues manned by simple fishermen. Rather, what were once simple fishermen before they began sampling the cargo. Now they crave more, more to be sniffed and injected in their veins, more to wipe clean the guilt for neighbors they beheaded without remorse.
    The Sinclairs once had dogs to protect them. That was before the stench of raw unseasoned cow bones that Mr. Sinclair boiled to a froth on the stove for them made Mrs. Sinclair vomit on the kitchen floor. But the dogs refused to eat the dried dog food endorsed by veterinarians who claimed to know what dogs liked. The next time John Sinclair boiled cow bones for his dogs and Beatrice vomited, he knew he had to give the dogs away. So he had iron bars installed on their windows and made plans to wire the house soon with an electric alarm system.
    Anna has been anxiously awaiting Paul Bishop’s arrival. Her head is swimming with scenarios that tumble one on top of the other: How will she manage? How will she explain herself to her mother when they