August Isle

by Ali Standish

  I wondered what he meant about the summer starting off bad, but only for a second. More important, Caleb wanted me to come back.

  “You will,” Sammy said firmly. “You and your mom both.”

  Sammy didn’t know about the postcards, or about how Mom never seemed to want to talk about the Isle. I hadn’t thought much about those things either, I realized, since my first week there. I didn’t argue with her, though. “You can always visit me in Illinois, too,” I said instead.

  Sammy flashed her braces, looped her arm around my waist, and ordered Caleb to open the door. We squeezed through, each of us bumping our shoulder on the doorframe.

  “This must be what it feels like to be Slug,” I said. Sammy giggled.

  Inside, she ordered a double cone of the daily flavor, raspberry lemonade. Caleb asked for honeysuckle, and I got sugarplum. When Sammy took her first lick, she closed her eyes in a blissful expression. “You have to try this,” she said. “I think it might be my all-time favorite.”

  We swapped cones and I tasted hers. She was right—it was amazing. Sour enough to make your lips pucker, but sweet enough that you didn’t mind. “Why didn’t I order this?” I asked. “They won’t have it next time we come.”

  “I want to eat this every day,” Sammy groaned, reluctantly handing the cone over to Caleb to try.

  “Hey!” I said suddenly. “What if I could make a pie that tasted like this? A raspberry-lemonade pie?”

  “Then I would love you forever,” Sammy said. “Do you think you can?”

  “Maybe.”

  Aunt Clare had said we would need something special for the contest. Maybe that meant making up my own recipe. As we left the shop, my mind began running through lists of possible ingredients, which was a good distraction from thinking about how much I would miss the Isle.

  I didn’t even notice that we had taken Caleb’s shortcut again. Not until Sammy stopped and pointed at her feet.

  “Hey,” she said, “we totally forgot about this!”

  “Oh yeah,” I mumbled, looking down at the names written in the sidewalk. Even though I hadn’t forgotten at all.

  “Who are these people?” Caleb asked.

  “Well, Clare is my mom, duh, and Beth is Miranda’s mom, and Ben is a mystery. We should ask my mom.”

  “He was probably just a random friend,” I said.

  “Yeah, probably,” Sammy replied, shrugging. “Mom said they had tons.”

  As we walked the rest of the way to Mr. Taylor’s, though, I couldn’t stop thinking about Ben. And Mom.

  When I came to the Isle, I thought I might find some kind of clue about why everything had changed between Mom and me. Since I’d never been able to find one at home, August Isle seemed like as good a place as any to look.

  Then Aunt Clare showed me those pictures, and I overheard her and Uncle Amar talking about me, and suddenly I understood why things between Mom and me had changed. It had nothing to do with the Isle and everything to do with me.

  But I still didn’t have an answer to any of the other questions I started with. The ones Sammy had reminded me of when she’d said that Mom would come back to the Isle someday. Why did Mom always throw away Aunt Clare’s postcards? Why wouldn’t she ever talk about the Isle? And if she had been so happy here, why had she ever stopped coming in the first place?

  Now the questions began to bother me again, like bits of flaking sunburn I really wanted to peel. They had replaced all thoughts of pie by the time we arrived at Mr. Taylor’s and followed him into the living room.

  “You seem distracted today,” Mr. Taylor said, frowning from across the sofa as we sat down.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I kind of have a lot on my mind.”

  “Ah,” he breathed. “Caleb, would you take that stack of books into my library? It’s leaning like the Tower of Pisa. Sammy, perhaps you could help him. Some of those titles are quite valuable. They need clean hands.”

  The creases in his brow doubled as he stared at the dribble of dried ice cream on Caleb’s chin.

  When Sammy and Caleb had each taken half the stack of books and disappeared into the library (“Ladrão! Polícia!” squawked Safira, who had been dozing in her cage), Mr. Taylor cleared his throat.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” he said. “Though really, they should change the expression. It was coined—pardon the pun—back when a penny was quite a large sum of money. Thoughts are valuable things, you know. They shouldn’t be ignored. Especially the ones that trouble you.”

  I bit my lip. How much should I say? Hadn’t I already told Mr. Taylor too much about Mom? The last thing I wanted was him feeling sorry for me again.

  “Just family stuff,” I said.

  “Your mother?”

  I hesitated, then nodded. He had already guessed it anyway.

  “I’m sorry. Family problems can be the hardest ones to solve sometimes.”

  “Do you have a family?” I asked, my eyes glancing around the room I already knew held no family portraits, only cheerful paintings of the beach.

  Mr. Taylor gazed out the window, and a smile wisped across his face. To me, it seemed like an echo of one that had touched his lips a long time ago. “Everyone has a family, Miranda.”

  “Right,” I said. “It’s just—you tell all these stories, but you never talk about yourself. So I didn’t know if . . .”

  “Well, I’m certainly no expert in this area,” he said. The smile had faded now. “Ask me about tulip mania in the Dutch Golden Age or the migration patterns of the saddle-billed stork and I can talk all day. Families are far more complicated.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  A sigh rose up in his chest. “Here’s what I can tell you,” he said finally. “Because I’m old and I have met many families. And I know all of them have their problems. Every single one.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But some problems are bigger than others.”

  “Certainly,” Mr. Taylor agreed. “But I don’t think the merit of a family is in how large or small their problems are. It’s in how they face those problems. To me, the most beautiful families are the ones who have the toughest trials and still find a way to help each other through.”

  He spoke slowly, like he was choosing each word very carefully. When he was done, we sat silently for a moment, listening to Sammy scolding Caleb for attempting to teach Safira a curse word.

  “I’m trying to fix them,” I said. “Our problems.”

  “Well, you can’t do it on your own, can you? Your mom has to do her part, too.”

  “How do you know?” I asked. “That it’s not just me? That I’m not the problem?”

  “Because you’re only a child,” he said. “I know children don’t like to hear that, but it’s true. And children aren’t responsible for adults’ problems. Believe me, we adults do a fine job making problems for ourselves.”

  I knew he was trying to make me feel better, but somehow his words only made me more frustrated.

  “Well, if I’m not responsible, what is?” I asked.

  Mr. Taylor considered this for a moment, then pointed a finger out the window. “You see my gates?” he asked. I followed his gaze, staring at the low iron gates I had climbed over the night I broke in. “Do you see that symbol inside them?”

  On each gate, at the center of the black bars, the metal had been bent to form two S’s that came together with curls on each end.

  “It’s a fancy heart,” I said.

  “That’s what I used to think, too,” Mr. Taylor said. Then he stood and began to rummage through the remaining three boxes, until finally he pulled out a large gray cloth. “But then I found this.”

  27

  The winds blew me to the west coast of Africa one fall, and I set my sails to rest for a time in Accra, the capital of Ghana. There I fell in love with the warmth of the people, the colors of the land, the movements of the bustling city.

  One afternoon I ventured out to Makola Market, where vendors sold anything you can
imagine to buy—miles of fruit, towering heaps of clothes, endless electronics. The air was filled with the sounds of haggling and honking horns and vendors selling their wares, as well as waves of smells—a rainbow of spices and rows of dried fish.

  I was accompanied by a law student at a local university who was paying his way by giving tours. He led me through the tightly packed crowds to a fabric stall where he asked a woman to pull out several different cloths, each of them in solid colors with black symbols imprinted in small squares throughout.

  “It’s beautiful fabric,” I said.

  “Not only fabric,” corrected my guide. “This is adinkra cloth. Every symbol on it represents a piece of wisdom passed down along many generations of Ashanti people. Our ancestors created these symbols so that we would not forget what they had learned.”

  I studied the cloth. “Don’t you think some things would be easier to forget?”

  My guide stared at me for a long moment, his eyebrows knitting together in disapproval.

  “I grew up not far from here,” he said to me, “in a beautiful house where I wanted for nothing. I had the best clothes, the best food, and the best schools. I had everything except the one thing I wanted most.

  “No matter how well I did in school or sports, it never seemed good enough to win my father’s approval. He always thought I could do better, work harder. And when it was time to go to university, he refused to pay my tuition, although he could certainly have afforded it. He told me I would have to get a job and pay my own way.

  “That night, my mother found me crying in my room. When she asked me what was wrong, I told her that I hated my father as he surely hated me. That I was no son of his.

  “The next morning, my mother woke me early and told me to get dressed and meet her in our car. We drove northwest for hours until we came to a little town outside of Kumasi, where the houses were small and run-down. ‘This,’ she said, ‘is where your father was raised. He is ashamed of this place. But there is no shame in where we are born. When I see this town, it reminds me how hard your father worked for a better life. Never slowing, never resting.’

  “I could not believe my ears,” said the young man. “I had no idea that my father had been poor. That it was only thanks to a kind teacher who saw his potential and an aunt who moved to Accra and found a scholarship for him that he ever left his town. And I understood then that he did not hate me. He was merely afraid. Afraid that he could still end up back where he had begun. Afraid that I might end up there, too, if he did not teach me to be like him—never slowing, never resting. He did not want me to know the suffering he had known.”

  I placed my hand on his shoulder then, for though I did not know his father, I, too, had known a man like this once. “He loves you,” I said, “in the best way he knows how.”

  The young man took the cloth from me then and pointed to a heartlike symbol. “This,” he said, “is sankofa: the symbol for a proverb that says it is not wrong to go back and remember our past. In fact, to move forward, we must honor our history, and learn from it. Sankofa reminds us that it is always better to remember, even when remembering is the hardest thing to do. Perhaps especially then. Do you see?”

  I looked down at the cloth he held, tracing the symbol with my mind’s eye. Though it was a warm day, I felt a shiver pass through me. “Yes,” I said. “I think perhaps I do.”

  “It wasn’t until I arrived back home that I even noticed the sankofa on my own front gates,” Mr. Taylor said. “You see, when west Africans were captured and brought here to be slaves, they brought their stories with them. Slave owners would try to stamp such stories out, to strip these captives of their humanity, but they found ways to remember who they really were. And to remind the generations that would follow that they were not slaves but people like any others—people with histories and families—who had been enslaved.”

  “Wow,” I said. We had studied slavery in history class last year, but we didn’t learn anything about sankofas or adinkra cloth. I wondered what else our textbook had left out. “It’s like a secret message.”

  “It is indeed,” agreed Mr. Taylor. “The same proverb is also symbolized sometimes by a bird that’s looking backward. And I think if you look closely at the gates, the two sides of the heart look like two birds. The curls at the bottom are like feet, pointing forward. But the curls at the top are their heads, pointing backward, toward one another.”

  If I scrunched up my eyes, the two halves of the heart kind of did look like birds. “So they’re moving forward, but looking back?” I asked.

  “Exactly,” Mr. Taylor said.

  “And you’re saying . . . I should be like those birds?”

  “I suppose I’m saying that the past is often the best place to look when we need help understanding something in our present. If I were you, that’s where I would start with trying to understand your mother.”

  But hadn’t I already done that? Aunt Clare’s photos had given me a glimpse into the past, and all I had learned was that Mom had been happier without me. What good would it do to keep investigating? What if it just made things worse?

  “I think I get what you mean about families,” I said. “Like, families that overcome stuff together end up being stronger. But what if that doesn’t happen? What if instead of bringing us together, our problems just tear my family apart?”

  Mr. Taylor stared at the picture over the mantel for a long moment. When he turned his gaze back to me, his eyes shone. He placed one of his hands—freckled and gnarled and scarred in several places—on mine.

  “Family is the most important thing we have, Miranda. It’s the best gift we’re given. It’s true that some people have to make their own families in life, but I don’t think you’re one of them.”

  We could hear Sammy’s and Caleb’s footsteps creaking back toward the living room.

  “And Miranda?” said Mr. Taylor. “Don’t be afraid to tell your friends what you’re going through. They’re another kind of family, you know. Trust them. Let them help you. That’s what families are for.”

  28

  That night, I told Aunt Clare about my idea for a raspberry-lemonade pie.

  “That sounds perfect, Miranda!” she said, clapping her hands together. “Very original. And I’ve already got raspberries in the fridge from our berry pie, and lemons left over from the lemon chiffon. What do you think? Want to give it a try?”

  We came up with the recipe as we went, making a lemon curd out of lemon juice, eggs, sugar, and butter, then stirring in chopped raspberries. While the pie baked, we made a raspberry meringue to go on top.

  It was the best pie yet, with crust as light as a cloud and filling that tasted like the end of summer—a tart sweetness that stayed on our tongues long after we were done.

  “Brava!” Uncle Amar cried as he swallowed his first bite. “This is truly the best pie I’ve ever tasted.”

  “You totally have to bake this one for the contest,” Sammy said. “There’s no way it won’t win.”

  “I want another slice,” said Jai.

  “Me too,” echoed Caleb. “It’s even better than the ice cream.”

  They all started to clap, and I stood and held the edges of my apron out in a little curtsy. When I looked up, I caught Caleb looking at me, and felt a blush shoot into my cheeks that made them tingle.

  After dinner, when Sammy and Caleb were downstairs fighting over what movie to watch and Jai was in his room, talking on the phone as usual, I slipped upstairs to the roof. I hadn’t let myself think about what Mr. Taylor said while I was making my pie. But his words had been rattling around my head while we ate dinner.

  He seemed so sure that whatever was broken between Mom and me wasn’t my fault. If there was any chance he was right, that I was missing something—something that had nothing to do with me—I needed to know.

  I pulled out my phone and stared down at the blank screen. My palms were sweating. I started to type a text to Mom, then stopped. I wasn’t exactly
sure what I was going to say to her, but whatever it was, I didn’t think it was the kind of thing you could really say over text.

  Instead I dialed her number. It rang and rang. And then, just as I had decided it had been stupid to think that she might actually pick up, she did.

  “Hi, sweetie!” Mom said, her voice cheerful. “You must have ESP. I was just thinking about you. How’s it going there?”

  The line was much better than it had been the last time we’d talked, so I could hear her voice loud and clear. For a second, I even thought I caught her scent on the breeze, which made my heart pinch with longing.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said, curling my knees up under my chin. “I’m good.”

  “Having fun?”

  “A lot,” I said, hesitating. I still wanted to keep the sailing lessons a surprise, but I also wanted to show Mom that I wasn’t the same Miranda I had been a few weeks ago.

  “I’ve been riding the roller coaster at the amusement park,” I said. “And Aunt Clare has been helping me learn to make pies. I’m actually kind of good at it now.”

  There was a pause. Long enough for me to realize that the only thing I wanted more than Mom to know I was changing was for her to tell me I didn’t need to.

  “Well, that’s great, honey,” she said finally. “I know how much you’ve been wanting to learn to bake.”

  The longing was suddenly replaced by strange heat that quivered in my chest like a second heart.

  That’s great? I know how much you’ve been wanting to learn to bake?

  If she really knew that, why hadn’t she ever helped me? So maybe she wasn’t the kind of mom who baked. But couldn’t she just do that one thing for me?

  “I saw your name today,” I said sharply. “It was written in the sidewalk with Aunt Clare’s. And with the name Ben.”

  Another pause. The wind blew, and this time it smelled only like salt.

  “Did you?” Mom said finally.

  “Who’s Ben?”

  “Oh, I . . . don’t really remember.” Her voice was flat and uncertain. Like quicksand.