Coconut Dreams

by Derek Mascarenhas

  They sit next to the path waiting to be noticed, like they’ve chosen a bad spot in hide-and-go-seek. Once you see them, you can’t miss them, bright white on the forest floor and appearing secretly, like the birds.

  “Oh, I love trilliums,” says Mrs. Dibben. “A sure sign of spring. Do you kids know it’s against the law to pick them?”

  “Really?” says Tommy.

  “Really,” says Mrs. Dibben. “Picking the flower does awful damage to the plant. It can take a long time before it regrows, if it does at all. The only time it’s acceptable is if you’re going to transplant them. I tried it once. I put one in my front yard, but it just wouldn’t take. They don’t like the direct sunlight. I guess that’s why you have to come out here and see them.”

  “Mrs. Dibben?” I say.

  “Yes, sweetie.”

  “My mom told me that trilliums are angels. God sends them down to see the world first from the ground up. And they can only get their wings after they’ve been trilliums. But if they get picked, they can’t make it back up to heaven.”

  “Little angels,” says Mrs. Dibben. “Ally, tell your mother that’s a lovely story.”

  Before I can answer, Ms. Bisset comes running down the path, screaming.

  “Mrs. Dibben!” Her face is red. “Natalie’s had an attack! She’s passed out farther up the trail.”

  I see Mrs. Dibben’s face change as she shifts gears like she must at the hospital when a patient comes in. “I’m on my way,” she says.

  “Ally, Tommy—stay right here on the trail,” Ms. Bisset tells us. “I’m going to run and call 911.”

  The two women run off in opposite directions down the trail. I want to go with Mrs. Dibben. Adults always think they can run faster than kids, but I can run like the wind. Last summer I knocked out one of my baby teeth when I tripped over a groundhog hole running my fastest. Our doctor said I ran so fast, the ground couldn’t keep up. I wonder if they’ll take Natalie to the hospital. Maybe if she hadn’t talked so much about her diabetes it wouldn’t have happened. That’s wrong. I hope she’ll be okay.

  I can’t see my teacher or Mrs. Dibben anymore and I notice how quiet the forest has become. I turn to Tommy. He’s stepped off the trail and is creeping toward the flowers. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.” He crouches down beside one of the trilliums and puts his hands around it.

  “Stop it!” I yell.

  “Make me.”

  I follow Tommy into the forest. But I’m too late: he plucks the trillium flower from its leaves. I can’t believe what I’ve just seen. I want to cry.

  “Here you go.” Tommy holds the flower out for me, like I’m supposed to take it.

  I’m confused why he’s giving it to me, and still upset. “I don’t want it.”

  “I thought girls liked flowers.”

  “I like them in the ground.”

  Tommy just tosses the flower to the forest floor.

  “I’m going to tell.” As soon as I say this, he pushes me to the ground. I don’t see it coming and land on my elbows and bum.

  “That’s for kicking me yesterday,” he says.

  The damp leaves are soaking into me, but I just lie there. Tommy grabs one of my pink rubber boots and pulls. He wrestles it off my foot and throws it behind him, then yanks my sock off and does the same with it. He stares for a few seconds, like he’s looking at a bug.

  “Ewww. Your toes are brown! Freak.” Tommy turns and runs off after Mrs. Dibben.

  I get up. I have to hop on one foot to get my boot and put it back on. I brush some mud and leaves off my sweater, and find my sock, but put it in my pocket. On the ground where I found it, I see the white petals.

  When Aiden and I are alone again on the bus ride home, he asks, “How was your field trip?”

  I tell him it was fine and tug at the same piece of sticky green tape covering up the hole in the seat in front of us. The day’s events swirl in my head. When I got back with my class, everyone was talking about how Natalie had been lying still on the ground and how the ambulance came and took her and her mom away.

  It starts to rain. Droplets race down the windows of the bus.

  “Is that Tommy kid still bugging you?” Aiden asks.

  “No,” I say, but I don’t look him in the eyes.

  Mom is always telling us how being different is a blessing, and how we’ll understand when we’re older. Right now, I don’t believe her. Different means you’re different.

  The rain comes down hard and crashes against the glass panes and metal roof. I can’t see outside anymore. At first it feels like we’re in a car wash, but then it’s like we’re trapped in a long, dark room. It feels weird having one bare foot in my boot, too. Inside my sweater pocket I squeeze my crumpled-up sock. I don’t know why I didn’t put it back on.

  I close my eyes and think of trilliums, but can only see the one that Tommy picked, just leaves and no petals. I wonder how long it will take to flower again, or if it ever will.

  When the Good Shines a Little Brighter

  ally

  A few days after my mom flew back to India, my dad was working a weekend shift, so I went to stay with my auntie Audrey, while Aiden went to a friend’s. Auntie Audrey wasn’t my actual aunt, but we called her that, anyway. On Saturday evening, she made her shrimp curry and rice that we ate at her white kitchen countertop, sitting on heavy stools. Auntie poured me milk into a glass that had a picture of an elephant with the word Tusker beneath it.

  “Is the curry too spicy for you?” Auntie asked.

  “The hotter the better,” I said. Just because I was born in Canada, all of my aunts thought I couldn’t handle spicy food. When Mom cooked, I’d get her to throw in an extra chili. “Not too many, you kids are already too skinny,” she’d say. When Dad ate something hot, beads of sweat rolled down his face.

  As I ate, I struggled to remove the shrimp tails with a fork. Auntie had left the shells on the shrimp instead of peeling them off before cooking, like my mom would.

  “It’s okay to use your hands,” Auntie said. “Herman used to cook them that way. He thought it gave them more flavour.”

  I pulled the shells off the shrimp with my hands and stuck my tongue inside to get every last drop of curry. “Can you still braid my hair after we finish?”

  “Sure, hon. Did we remember to bring the movie in from the car?”

  “Yep, I put it on top of the TV.” I had picked The Lion King from the rental place. I’d seen it once before in the theatre with my dad and brother. Auntie said she’d only seen the adverts for it. Mom had told me that after Auntie Audrey left India, and before she came to Canada, she had lived in Africa for many years. I was excited to see what she thought of the movie.

  audrey

  It wasn’t until 1967 that I finally went on a safari. Herman took me for our honeymoon. He had been on a safari once, before we’d met two years ago, and I’d wanted to go ever since I arrived in Nairobi as a girl and heard the stories of the animals. The elephants especially.

  “We’ll rent our own Jeep, Audrey. Just you and me,” Herman promised.

  “You can drive one of those?” I asked.

  “Of course. You’re lucky you married a jack-of-all-trades.”

  The wedding had been draining on both of us. We’d held it at Herman’s restaurant, which made things easier, but there were still so many guests. My uncle Chester came all the way from South Africa. He was the one who’d first introduced me to Herman, though when Chester said Herman’s name it sounded like “Harry-Man.”

  When I told Herman this the first time we met, I worried he might take it the wrong way, as his head was balding.

  But Herman just replied, “When I heard Audrey, I pictured Audrey Hepburn. But you put her to shame.”

  ally

  “Was it difficult with your mom gone get
ting ready for school this week?” Auntie asked, weaving thin bunches of my hair into braids.

  I looked back quickly. Her own hair was a mix of black and grey. “Dad helped us,” I said, but I didn’t tell her that he forgot to do laundry and I had to wear a bathing-suit bottom for underwear one day. He tried his best, but Mom had a way of making Black Forest ham sandwiches taste good, and she put notes in our lunch bags, like Try your best or Make someone smile. I missed her then.

  Auntie gave the top of my head a tap. “Go have a look in the mirror.”

  I hopped down from the kitchen stool and ran to the giant wooden cabinet in the family room. The handles of the cabinet were elephants’ heads, their trunks curled to form loops. On each cabinet door was an oval golden mirror that reflected the room a deep yellow, like a dream. I held up my pigtails and admired them. “Thanks, Auntie,” I shouted.

  “You’re welcome, sweetie. I’ll be out in a minute—just going to put the food away and tidy up.”

  I said, “Okay,” but the grandfather clock chimed six o’clock at the same time, and I wasn’t sure if she’d heard me. I walked over to the big clock and looked through the clear glass at its swinging heart. My grandpa’s heart had stopped working the week before. I never even got to meet him. I’d never met any of my grandparents, only seen black-and-white family photos taken either on a beach or in front of a house with a tiled roof that looked more like a cottage—all smiles from my mom’s parents and her and her brothers and sisters. My dad’s family pictures were exactly the same, minus the smiles. Aiden and I liked trying to guess which kid was our mom or dad in each picture.

  Aiden had gone to India when I wasn’t born yet, but now I was eight and still hadn’t been. Before Mom flew back a few days ago for my grandpa’s funeral, I’d asked her to take me with her. She said this type of visit wasn’t for kids. Plus I had school, so it was out of the question.

  But I was glad to be with Auntie Audrey instead of the babysitter. She had such interesting things around her living room: skinny wooden shields with faces carved into them, a lamp that looked like it could have a genie inside, and on the coffee table was a game with a board and marbles made of precious stones. Aiden sometimes called Auntie Audrey “Aunt Teek,” because she often took us antiquing with her. He never had a good time, but I loved it. We went to all kinds of places: garage sales, trading posts, and small shops with bells above the doors that jingled when you walked in or out.

  “Searching high and low for nothing in particular,” Auntie would say. Even though everything we found in the stores was old, it was all new to me. There were dolls, drawings, chairs, sewing machines, fancy knives and forks, and old tools I couldn’t recognize. Last time, Auntie and I bought a wooden end table, which sat in the corner of the living room with a circular top and bottom, and a woman carved into the wood between.

  audrey

  As we were leaving for our trip, Herman surprised me with a bouquet of roses on the front seat of the car. The roses were yellow with red tips and looked like little flames. I gave him a sloppy kiss before he started the car. He had booked a safari guide for five o’clock that evening, and we’d eaten an early lunch of mutton curry and chapatis leftover from the wedding. I had packed some in a metal tiffin to take with us, along with a canteen of water and two bottles of Coca-Cola.

  The drive to the Masai Mara was long, the road spotted with stray rocks and potholes. Herman weaved to avoid them without slowing down for all but the most treacherous. I’d moved the roses to the back seat, and with the windows open they fluttered in the breeze. As we motored along, I took slow sips of Coca-Cola with my other arm out the window, my hand floating and bouncing on the air rushing by. When it started to rain, I kept my arm outside, enjoying the cool, tingling drops; in the short rain season, the clouds changed their minds quickly, and often.

  A couple of hours into the drive, Herman pointed to something on the road in the distance. “What’s that up there?”

  I squinted. “Looks like cows.”

  We got closer and slowed down, eventually stopping for a herd crossing the road. The cows were brown, white, or black, or a mix of those colours. A cloud of red dust rose around them. The sounds of their shuffling, mooing, and bells blended into one droning noise.

  Herman pointed again. “Look—Masai warriors.”

  The men walking amongst the cows wore red checkered cloth and beads around their heads and necks. They were tall and skinny, just like the long sticks they used to herd the cows and protect them from becoming prey.

  My eyes were drawn to a pond off the road where a few Masai women were collecting water in clay pots. One woman placed a rolled cloth on her head. She bent down, lifted the heavy pot, and settled it on top of the roll. For the first few steps, she held the pot with one hand for balance, but then she let go as she found her stride. The women were warriors, too.

  ally

  While Auntie did the dishes, I went upstairs to use the bathroom. The soap smelled like peaches. Down the hall from the bathroom were her kids’ old bedrooms. The beds were made and the kids’ framed degrees hung on the walls. They were adults now, and lived in different cities. I wondered how Auntie lived in such a big house by herself.

  I came back downstairs and into the family room. Between the couch and the fireplace was the end table we’d bought last time we went antiquing. The woman carved into the table stood tall, with long legs, and arms that held the tabletop over her head. Auntie had told me what the name for the woman in the table was, but I couldn’t remember.

  I ran my hands along the smooth wood but took a few steps back when I saw the small golden urn on top of the fireplace mantel. The ashes of Auntie’s husband were in there. He’d died when I was younger. The one thing I remembered about him was how he always carried hard candy in his pocket.

  Auntie’s voice startled me. “All set for the movie?”

  “Yep,” I said, and turned away from the urn.

  audrey

  I was so entranced by the women that when the cows finally cleared the road, I wanted to go talk to them instead of leaving. But Herman was worried about our scheduled safari and that we were already late. Through the back window, I watched the women recede. As we drove, the road got bumpier and the grass grew greener; the hills rose and fell from the earth like soft waves in the sea.

  “We’ll have to quickly drop off our stuff at the lodge.” With one hand on the wheel, Herman fiddled with the dial on the binoculars hanging around his neck. “Then we can head back out to see if we can catch some of the action.”

  “Okay. I’ll have to go pee, though.” I held up my empty Coca-Cola bottle.

  Herman gazed out into the savannah. “Look at all of those trucks.”

  Five or six ivory-coloured vehicles like our own were clustered just off the roadside. “What do you think they’re looking at?”

  “I don’t know, but we should go check it out.”

  “I thought we were going to drop our stuff off first.”

  “Whatever they’re looking at may be gone by then.” Herman pressed the brakes and steered off the road, toward the other trucks.

  As we drew closer to the other safari trucks filled with tourists, we saw a pair of lions lying on the grass.

  I rolled up my window. “We’re so close! They’re not going to try to attack us?”

  “As long as we stay in the vehicle, they see us as some big dumb animal they can’t eat and who isn’t trying to eat them.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive.” Herman waved to the drivers and passengers in the other trucks nearby. He handed me the binoculars, but I didn’t need them. We were that close.

  The lioness was lying on her belly, her paws stretched in front of her. The male lion was standing; he had a full, chestnut-coloured mane and stared off into the distance. The lion’s stance suggested it was hungry, but not for food.
/>   I turned to Herman, excited, and said, “I think they’re going to mate.”

  The male swaggered up behind the female and lay on top of her. I couldn’t help but laugh; Herman joined me.

  The male licked and bit the lioness’s neck. She glanced back and showed her fangs but didn’t move away. The male’s body pumped for less than thirty seconds before stopping.

  “That was quick,” I said.

  “Not at all like your lion,” Herman said, with a peck on my neck.

  The lioness rolled on her side. The male stood and circled her once, before falling sideways with his body first, then letting his head drop to the ground.

  ally

  “Simba!” Auntie said. We were watching the movie from the carpet instead of the couch. “That’s the actual word for lion in Swahili.”

  “What’s Swahili?” I asked.

  “It’s the language they speak in Kenya, and a few other countries.”

  All of the animals in the movie were singing. “How long ago did you live there?”

  “We came to Canada in seventy-eight, so almost twenty years. Gosh, that seems like a long time.” She shook her head slowly. “Now, don’t ask me how long ago I moved from Goa—I wouldn’t be able to tell you.”

  While Simba sang about how he couldn’t wait to be king, my eyes were drawn to the end table with the woman.

  “Auntie, what is that lady holding the table called?”

  “It’s a caryatid figure.”

  “But what does it mean?”

  “It’s a name for a woman carved into a supporting structure. You see them as stone pillars on old buildings. They remind me of the women of our culture. Under great stress, they remain strong. You know, we come from long lines of strong women, and you inherited that strength.”

  I looked at the table again. “I think my arms would get tired after a while.”

  Auntie laughed; she had a loud laugh that made me laugh along. “It’s in you,” she said, “don’t worry.”