A Simple Distance (10 page)

I went.

By the time I returned to the conference room with the two halves of orange, my mother was sitting upright against the wall. Cynthia, sitting next to her, took a piece of the fruit from my hand and placed it in my mom’s.
Hold this under your nose. It will bring you back.

The inside of the orange was red. Like my mother’s eyes, staring straight through me.

I fell back into the closest chair alongside the large oak conference table; felt as though I had the wind knocked out of me.

I pressed the other half of the orange under my own nose, stared at my mom, collapsed for the second time in two days.

My mother was unraveling right before my eyes. How could I not shelter her?

I can’t do it.
My words surprised me as much as them. They stared up at me.
Cynthia, I have to take my mother home. She’s obviously not well … But we are not ready yet for tomorrow’s hearing. We’ve barely begun to go through your testimony. We’ll have to get a continuance. I’ll ask opposing counsel to agree to an additional week. I’ll just tell them the truth. I have to deal with a family emergency … I’m sorry.

And I think that for the rest of my life, the sharp smell of citrus will be enough to stop me in my tracks. Sometimes a big red flag means blood.

CHAPTER 12

The day I was supposed to be trying the biggest hearing of my young career, I wasn’t even close. The judge had granted our request for a continuance. By then, those things that lived in the ground would have begun to eat through the wood veneer of my uncle’s casket out back beneath the guava and spreading baobab trees at Godwyn. Translucent lizards the size of my fist sat atop his gravestone, listened to the low growl of the waves crashing along the reef, watched the thunder clouds rolling in with their storms, the rough Atlantic turning green with the coming of hurricanes.

My mother’s imbalance and Granny’s iron fist tipped us to the ground. The two of us tumbled to the airport, onto a plane, and headed toward Baobique.

I did not want to go. More than anything in the world, I did not want to go and face her family. Last they’d seen me—rolling around behind Godwyn with Susan—they’d asked me, in no uncertain terms, to take my American morals and leave their island. But my mom’s voice, hoarse from her sore throat, had no force against Granny’s anymore. And she couldn’t afford to lose another home.

We were entering the last leg of our trip, just hours away, at the international airport in San Juan.

My mother was fast asleep across two of the black plastic and metal chairs near our departure gate.

I left my post at the top of that particular staircase, hoped no one would try to steal her passport—or at least would catch her oozing pink eye if they did.

In San Juan, I took all I could get: wandered the corridors eliciting simple nods of recognition with my mismatched eyes and loopy curls. There, I looked like I belonged. Keeping silent when addressed—by a lost traveler, a janitor, a banker—they greeted me in Spanish, continued until the blankness in my expression gave me away. It was only then they treated me as an American, switched to English.

After using up nearly one of my two hours in the airport, I took a seat opposite my mother, among the other Baobiquens bound for Beckford Hall.

The first time I flew to Baobique with my mom, I was ten. She’d managed to stay awake the entire trip. She’d also managed to remember I needed a passport and sat me under the big electric dryer, pink plastic curlers rolled into four lines from my forehead to my neck, for two hours the night before I had to take my photo, styling my hair in two cascading ringlets on either side of my head, so Granny wouldn’t complain when she asked to see my passport. That was the same year she sent me to school on Picture Day at Lincoln with my hair completely uncombed, deciding not to purchase the results either because the ten dollars was better spent on cereal, eggs, and low-fat milk, or because she couldn’t possibly claim a child who could look so unkempt. Small wonder she cut all my hair off before we actually left for Baobique; my mom was not up to the task of remaining my hairdresser.

When we arrived at Beckford Hall that trip, the customs officer didn’t recognize my mom’s face or my father’s last name, still on her passport, and sent us to the foreigner’s line because I was from the wrong place: the United States.

Maybe that was why she only spoke
of
me that trip, instead of ever
to
me, and laughed along with Uncle Martin’s wife when their maid tried to dress me in the morning and I ran down the hall screaming because some strange woman was trying to remove my nightclothes.

I woke in Granny’s second bedroom at Tours, marred head to toe with mosquito welts from the hole at the top of her old netting, to the sound of Uncle George’s booming voice, looking just for me, chanting:
Where … is … Jean? … Where … is … Jean?

I ran out to Granny’s living room in my lavender, nosleeved pajamas and short, short hair to the wrong uncle. He wasn’t Uncle Charles from Canada. He wasn’t anyone I knew at all. But he smiled so wide when he saw me, I forgave him on the spot.

It was nice to be noticed. My parents had just divorced, and by that time my dad had already started forgetting to pick me up on the weekends.

It was that first meeting, way back then, that I claimed Uncle George as my own. A replacement for my own absentee father.

I would have followed Uncle George to the ends of the earth, like a duckling imprinting on the first thing it saw. It was as if Uncle George, and all those mosquitoes, were the only ones happy I’d come at all.

* * *

The Beckford Hall airport is at the northern end of Baobique, close to Granny. Most people prefer to fly into Beckford Hall because it is much safer than the De Canne airport, near Bato, the capital and busiest town at the southernmost tip of the island, where the wind off the sea can flip a plane.

In San Juan there are no worries like that. The airport in Puerto Rico is big, more like the ones in the U.S. than on the little islands. And so there I transitioned slowly to my mother’s Third World, not yet required to let go of all my luxuries.

I studied each face in the Baobique section of the airport. From there on out, I would be watched. Every one of those people, save one or two white American or European scuba divers, were Baobiquen, and had already begun watching me, across from my lump of slumbering mother, wondering how I came to be a Pascal.

You are a Pascal
, a middle-aged man with a receding hairline and tiny graying curls, cropped close against dark, dark skin, addressed me with an accent belying long stints in North America. He pointed to my mom, took the seat directly adjacent to mine.
If she is your mother, you must be a Pascal.

I didn’t want to play nice with someone who obviously knew my mother’s family, someone who’d probably side with them if he found out the truth about me. But he knew my name; I had no excuse for reticence. I conceded,
I am
.

I am Louis Petion.
He settled in for extended conversation, left me no out.
I am sorry to hear about George. I attended his burial last week. They did a beautiful job of it, out at Godwyn.

That’s my mother’s house.
I pointed across the aisle.
George was my uncle.

He smiled, small. Encouraged.
You know, I was in politics with your uncle. I was on the other side, Peoples’. He was Liberty.

Admittedly, I was curious …
Did you know Prime Minister Hill?

Oh yes. I worked directly with him for some time.

I’ve never met any Socialists on Baobique. I only know my mother’s family.

Mr. Petion scooted closer in his black plastic airport chair, looked around him conspiratorially, lowered his voice to almost a whisper.
You know … some people think his heart attack was no accident. There were rumors of an assassination. Hill was a very radical man. Too radical for many. He wanted the public cemetery, you know. His family went against his wishes when they buried him on their private estate.

My uncle told me Hill was once imprisoned in Canada for instigating Black Power demonstrations.

That is true. I was there. It was during university. But what is wrong with speaking your mind? Even if it means they’ll lock you up or kick you out, like they did to Hill?

They kicked him out of university?

He laughed, tossed his head back, his chin to the sky.
Young Pascal, they kicked Hill out of Canada. He was a troublemaker, I’ll give him that. He made people very uncomfortable.

Mmmm. I can understand that.

Mr. Petion smiled big then, as if I were joking, winked my way.
But Pascal, what could a sweet young woman like yourself know of trouble-making, na?

I changed the subject fast, fast, rose to wake my mother for boarding.
Well, I would have liked to meet Prime Minister Hill. I’m sorry I never got the chance.

* * *

When there are too many twenty-five-seaters flying in and out of Beckford Hall, its single runway used by both the arriving and departing planes, sometimes you have to circle the island to bide time.

Normally the planes fly through the valley and land toward the sea, rather than toward the mountains. Since it was overcast in the valley, we landed toward the mountains. But the winds are bad that way, the runway short, and there’s a chance you might crash into the rock.

We didn’t. So everyone on the plane burst out clapping the moment we touched down. Outside the oval windows of our plane, I could see a storm coming, dark and gray. In the foreground, each leaf of the long coconut fronds moving separately in the wind, reflecting leftover light.

We hadn’t called Granny to tell her we were coming to address her threats about adding my uncles as heirs to Godwyn. No one in the family knew we were there. So no one was waiting to pick us up. I’d booked the tickets the night before, after I’d gotten the call that the judge had granted us the continuance in Cynthia’s case.

Mr. Petion would not hear of letting us take a taxi.

His brother, come to pick him up, threw my backpack and all my mom’s bags on the flatbed of his truck, ushered us into his cab, but did not speak. The brother climbed onto the flatbed with the bags. Mr. Petion took the wheel.

My mother, between us, was utterly useless, moving only when told to, from one seat to the next, saying nothing. I was embarrassed; me, not even Baobiquen, calling on help like that from a stranger.

Along the way, a tinge of rust on all things metal: red and green tin roofs, cars, street signs, fences, empty aluminum cans strewn by the roadside. Red Stripe. And Fanta.

We drove mostly in silence, half awkward, half not; pulled up the drive at Godwyn, the crotons and small palms leading us to the car port.

Outside the truck, Mr. Petion’s brother handed me my backpack. I asked him,
Can I help with the gas?
Reached for my wallet.

They laughed at my
foolishness
. And asked me how long I’d be visiting.

Until I can talk some sense into my grandmother,
I joked.

Ha ha! Into Granny Pascal? Then you’ll never leave!
Mr. Petion joked back.

He pressed his business card into my palm. An accountant in Bato.
Call me if you need anything, young Pascal. I will be back soon.

They had another hour on the windy road south.

CHAPTER 13

Almost a year had passed since I’d set foot on Godwyn. It was the last place Susan and I’d made love, before we got caught and Uncle George requested my departure, half-paralyzed, from Granny’s second bedroom. Patriarchs buried in its breast, the house my mother wanted to keep as home. Her crumbling, wooden Godwyn: plastic on rotting cedar planks to keep the outside out; plastic on antique chairs, over the armoire, to keep them dry just one more rainy season; bats in the attic; rats in the crawl space below, where the dogs slept. Yet, all with an elegance calling out from its front porch, its red tin roof and deep purple bougainvillea, all demanding their due respect. It might merely be a matter of time before the next strong winds of the season take down a weight-bearing wall, but there is something more to that house than its structure. Godwyn stands, time itself.

The wind from the coming storm wrapped me with its long arms; hugged me tight, tight; squeezed the breath from my lungs. Baobique had me once again, and I feared it would never let go.

But my mom seemed to have lost at least a touch of her inertia. She wandered off, out past the graves, as if ordered by some silent voice that it was time to switch seats.

I let her go: down the dirt path, reddish-brown between green, stopping only for the sharpest of thorns or sticks beneath her feet, padding her way to the edge of memory; a girl, once again, taking along a dog and a cutlass, even though the path was overused by the squatters in Grampy’s garden; through the small guava trees, bananas, and tall arching coconuts, she’d make her way in the rain-wet bush to where she could see. When she got there, she’d stand silent, holding the dog tight, tight, so he wouldn’t break her peace. And she’d look out over the tall grass and thin trees, across the valley to the next mountain, and the next, and the next. And she’d lean on her Morne Volcan. Rest.

Behind her, the constant roll of the Atlantic, its soft call never leaving her ears.

She passed from my sight.

I turned to Godwyn, unlocked first the top, then the bottom of my mother’s locks. The entrance more shutter than door, I twisted the long wooden arm that acted as a knob, pointed it straight up, and pushed through to the dining room. Yesterday’s doors. Bright green against a whitewash of walls.

Like the door, the shutters throughout the house had been closed tight from people, animals, and wind, but it was getting dark, and no sign yet of the dogs, so I only opened the window with glass, the one in my mom’s room. From her bed I saw the sun setting over the rough Atlantic, out past the guava trees, the baobabs, and the graves. I had never known Godwyn to hold more than one body. But it wasn’t just Grampy anymore. Uncle George was out there, too.