“Little Eddie!” a voice calls from inside the house.
I grab the ball between my sweaty palms and toss it over the wall.
“Tank you,” calls the first boy in a thick accent, and the children giggle even more. I wave as, one by one, their faces disappear behind the wall like rubber ducks at a carnival game.
My brother is standing in the doorway, shading his eyes with his hand. “Come meet Abuela.”
10
AFTER THE BLINDING sun outside, it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust. Inside the house, a dim shape slowly takes the form of a small woman propped on couch cushions. As my vision clears, I look for signs of cancer. Can cancer be seen? Or is it hidden, like how when people look at me, they can’t tell my father is dead?
“Eduardito,” she says, her voice thin and warbly. She has short white hair and a face so wrinkled, it looks like her eyes are going to be sucked into the sockets. I know that makes her sound kind of creepy-looking, but her lips are a cheery pink, and she’s wearing a sweatshirt with a picture of a kitten on it, so she ends up looking kind of cute, like a worn-out teddy bear that you’ve had your whole life.
“Ven acá, Eduardito,” she says, and pats the seat beside her. She must be talking to me. “Come.” She smiles her pink lipstick smile when the English words come out. “I don’t speak English very good.”
I didn’t know she could speak any English, so I say, “That’s okay.”
“Give her a kiss on the cheek, Little Eddie,” my brother says. “Un beso. That’s what we do here.” He’s leaning against the glass patio door, watching us.
Abuela angles her face toward me. “Un besito,” she says.
I do not feel like kissing anybody, much less a grandma with cancer, but I lean down and brush my lips against her cheek. It’s surprisingly soft.
“You look like your papa,” she says once I’m sitting next to her like she wants.
Me, look like Papa? That doesn’t seem possible. Big Eddie? Sure, he’s tall and dark like Papa was. No one would ever doubt that he and Papa were related. But me? I’m short, lighter-skinned. My hair isn’t wavy like Big Eddie’s. I shake my head.
Abuela laughs and reaches a hand toward me. She touches my mouth. “This,” she says, and then she touches my chin and cheeks. “These. What is it called?”
“Mouth,” I say, “chin, cheeks. They look like my dad’s?”
“Exactly,” she says.
“She’s known our dad since he was in high school—no, younger maybe,” Big Eddie says. He sits down on her other side and switches to Spanish before translating. “My parents were childhood sweethearts. That’s why Abuela knew our dad so well.”
“Los Eduardos,” she says, and grips both of our hands in her small ones. Hers are brown and wrinkled. Mine look pale next to them. I try to gently escape her grasp, but she has a tight grip. “Eduardo y Eduardito.”
I glance over at my brother. “Eduardito?” I ask.
“It means ‘Little Eddie’—only in Spanish. That’s what she called me when I was little too.” My brother must have more practice escaping, because he gets up and pulls a fat photo album from the bottom of a crowded bookshelf. “You want to see pictures of me? The old photos?”
“Sí, we look at photos.” Abuela lets go of my hand, and Big Eddie lays the album across the rainbow-striped blanket on her lap. She points to a black-and-white photograph of a teenage boy. “Eduardo Aguado León,” she says. The Ds in this familiar name are soft like her hands. She brushes invisible dust off the picture. The boy is sitting on a beach smiling shyly at the camera. Even in shades of gray, I can tell that the sky was brilliant blue, and I can’t wait to see the real beach, go swimming, catch some fish.
Abuela turns the page, and there is the same teenager again, this time seated on the sand next to a pretty teenage girl in a polka-dot bikini. “Ana María,” she says. “Mi hija linda,” she adds, her voice stretched like the blanket across her lap.
“That’s my mom.” Big Eddie runs his finger over the photo. “Like seeing a ghost.”
I look from his hand to his face. “Have you ever seen a ghost?” I ask.
“Haven’t you?”
I shake my head. “Ghosts aren’t real.”
Big Eddie and Abuela exchange glances. “If you’ve never seen a ghost,” Big Eddie says, “how do you know?”
“Well, have you seen a ghost?”
“Sure. I’ve seen ghosts here in Colombia.”
“Have you seen one in Minnesota?” I ask.
He shakes his head and then says, “I don’t think it’s as common to see ghosts there.”
“Why not?”
“Maybe there isn’t as much imagination. Or sorrow. It takes sorrow and a little imagination to see a ghost.”
“I have imagination. Does that mean I’ll see a ghost?”
Big Eddie shrugs one shoulder.
“Or does that mean ghosts are made up?” I don’t say anything about sorrow. Everyone assumes I’m sad about not having a dad. But am I? Since I don’t really remember Papa, I’m not sure.
“They’re definitely real,” Big Eddie says. “But you need to open your mind to see them. I remember a ghost I saw when I was about your age. I was with friends from school. When I pointed at the ghost, they didn’t see him.”
“Him?” I try to picture my brother being my age and seeing ghosts, fishing with Papa.
“Yeah, a man with a sword, maybe like the kind the Spanish conquistadores had.”
“A ghost soldier?”
“Well, not exactly. Ghosts aren’t quite one thing or another. I’m not sure the guy was a soldier. But he was definitely a ghost. It was sundown and we were heading back to El Centro, and I peeked down an alley and there he was. Those other boys didn’t see. Not sure if that was because they had no imagination or if they just missed him.”
“What did he do? The ghost, I mean.”
“Oh, nothing. Just looked at me. They’re not scary. At least not in my experience.”
We both stare at the photo of his mom again, and I realize he looks even more like her than he looks like our dad. It’s strange too because I can see that his mom isn’t anything like mine. While Ana María was tall, Mama is short, and Mama’s cropped blond hair is nothing like the long ponytail in the photo of Ana María. And yet Papa married both of them. Maybe it doesn’t matter so much what you look like on the outside. It’s hard to imagine Papa having first one wife and one son and, later, another wife and another son. Did he love the Colombian wife and son better? Would he still have had a heart attack if he hadn’t come to Minnesota? What if Papa weren’t my dad? Would I still be me?
Abuela takes the album out of her grandson’s hands and turns to the next page. “Yo,” she says, patting her chest proudly. “Pretty, no?” She points at a picture of a woman with long black hair standing beside an arched door. Even though she’s much younger, the eyes of the woman in the picture match Abuela’s eyes.
“Bellísima, Abuela.” Big Eddie kisses her cheek. “You were—are—beautiful.”
Abuela jumps ahead a few pages in the book. There is Eduardo Aguado León looking less like a teenager and more like a man. Like seeing a ghost. For me, the face of my own dad in this photo album in Colombia is as strange as the idea of Big Eddie seeing a ghost in Cartagena.
In the picture, just behind Papa, I spot a petite blond woman in a flowy sundress. “That’s my mom,” I say in surprise.
My parents in the photograph are younger than they are in the wedding photo that sits on Mama’s dresser. Now there are two things I can’t believe: I can’t believe I’m in Colombia, and I can’t believe my parents were ever young like that.
Abuela leans back and closes her eyes. She coughs a rasping gasp, and I jump. Maybe that’s the sound of cancer. By the time Nita comes in from the kitchen and sets a glass of juice on the table, Abuela has stopped coughing. She falls asleep with her chin bowed and her hand still gripping a tissue. The cushions are scratchy on the bac
ks of my legs, and I want to get up, but I don’t know if that would be rude. The clock on the bookshelf interrupts the silence of the living room. Next door the kids shout, and I wish I could go play soccer with them. Instead I keep flipping through the album. There are more pictures of Big Eddie’s mom, some show a scruffy little dog, and others are of Big Eddie as a baby. And then there is a page filled with pictures of fish.
The ticking of the clock fades and the itchiness of the cushions eases as I examine the fish.
These are different from the fish in the picture of Papa and Big Eddie, but they’re almost as big. Strange-looking fish with crooked fins and ones with lolling eyes. Fish with shiny scales and fish that look as ugly as what you might find at the bottom of a dumpster. And they are spectacular. I reach into my pocket and pull out the bronze medal. The fish with the fishing pole grins.
“Do you think we can we go fishing sometime?” I whisper to my brother, stuffing the medal back into my pocket. “I’m gonna be in a fishing tournament. Back at Lake Mad. Later this summer. Maybe you could help me practice?”
Big Eddie glances from his phone to Abuela sleeping, her mouth half-open, her breathing ragged. “Maybe,” he whispers back. It’s a “maybe” that sounds a lot like “probably not.”
We spend most of that first day sitting on the couch with Abuela, who sleeps on and off. When she’s awake, she wants to know all about my life: school, Mama, my friends. I tell her about Liam, who still hasn’t texted me back, but I don’t say anything about Cameron. Adults always tease kids about boyfriends and girlfriends. I tell her about going to middle school in the fall, but I don’t think she understands. Big Eddie tries to translate, but I don’t think he understands either.
We eat dinner at the table near the open patio doors. A breeze cools me as I eat the rice and chicken that Nita cooked. After dinner, when we’re back in the living room, Nita and my brother talk in Spanish whispers. They both glance at Abuela, who’s fallen asleep again, her mouth partly open, her breathing still ragged.
“Do you want to go to El Centro?” Big Eddie asks me, quiet so he doesn’t wake his grandmother. “We can go there while Nita stays with Abuela.”
Nita smiles and nods at me. Then he explains that El Centro is the original Cartagena that was built with a huge wall around it to protect it.
“Protect it from what?” I ask.
“Pirates!” he says. “Well, pirates and the English invaders. Lots of invaders. Everyone wanted Cartagena. Everyone was fighting over the city.”
I remember a fight I saw on the bus once. I didn’t hear the beginning of the argument, but all of a sudden this kid with a striped stocking cap was getting beaten up by this other boy who always wore a black sweatshirt no matter the weather. The boy’s friends were shouting, “Get him! Punch him!” and some other kids were yelling at them to stop. Liam and I didn’t really know either of them, so we just scrunched down in our seat, but now I wish I had been one of the kids shouting “stop.”
“Don’t look so worried, Little Eddie. No one fights now. El Centro is beautiful. Like a history lesson in real life.” Abuela has just awoken, and she smiles at both of us. Big Eddie turns to her. “He’ll like El Centro, won’t he, Abuela?”
Abuela smiles and nods. “Vayan,” she says, her voice weak. “Go.”
We’re in the car for less than ten minutes when I see a huge gray wall that wraps around the bend in the road.
“That’s the wall: La Muralla. It surrounds the original city of Cartagena.” Big Eddie points while turning left and squeezing the car through a small opening in the wall. Going through the wall is like going through the car wash with the Honda at home, but when we come through, instead of blinking in the light through wet, clean windows, I’m looking at bright buildings, colorful like the saltwater taffy I get at the state fair.
Even though it’s barely six thirty, the sun has set. Unlike in Minnesota, where the summer days are long and winter ones short, it gets dark at six o’clock every night in Cartagena, Big Eddie tells me. Colombia is nearly at the equator, and here the days and nights are equal. I glance at Big Eddie in the driver’s seat. Night and day. Opposite but equal. Like two brothers?
When we arrive in the center of town, the amber glow of streetlights makes me think of Christmas morning even though it’s hot and sticky. Climbing out of the car, the hum of Spanish and the whisper of the ocean surround me, close like the wall. I shut my eyes and try to capture the sound so that, when I’m back in my room at home, I’ll remember.
“Vámonos.” Big Eddie leads me across the street and up a crowded cement ramp. I follow him to the top of a wide stone wall where dance music thrums from a café and teenagers sit around metal tables.
“When they were young, my mom and our dad used to come up here every night,” Big Eddie says, looking out at the sea that is, at this time of night, a black hole. I follow his gaze, but I’m distracted by the couples nearby. Next to us, a man is seated on the low stone lip of the wall, a woman on his knee. Their mouths are pressed together in a kiss.
“Abuela said they always had their arms around each other,” Big Eddie continues. We both look over at the couple, and I feel funny. I’ve never seen a real-life kiss up close like this. You can hardly tell where one face ends and the other begins. I wonder how they can breathe. “My mother had long black hair. Abuela used to have the same hair.”
Big Eddie turns away and rubs his face with both hands. Then he suddenly crouches, posed like a sword fighter. “En garde! Can’t you imagine the soldiers up here fighting off the pirates?”
I look away from the couple and hold out my own imaginary sword. Liam and I used to sword fight with empty paper towel rolls. We would start out banging the cardboard tubes, and then we would end up pummeling each other until we were laughing so hard that we would fall over in a heap.
After Big Eddie and I spar a few times, he sheaths his imaginary sword and leads me along the wall that protects the city and its maze of red tile rooftops and soaring palm trees. We pass more couples, groups of rowdy kids, families with small children in strollers. Vendors are selling bunches of roses and little toys that fly into the air. There’s a man selling striped straw hats.
“They were together since they were as young as you,” Big Eddie says. At first I’m not sure who he’s talking about because I’m so busy watching the hat man. After selling one, he takes the whole stack and balances them all on his head again.
“Your mom?” I ask.
Big Eddie nods and then stops walking. “My mom loved our dad, and Abuela loved him too. That’s why she wanted you to visit us. She wants to get to know you.”
“I’m glad,” I say in a small voice. Even though Abuela is old and wrinkly, and even though she has cancer and barely speaks English, I’m glad I’m going to get to know her, too.
I run to catch up with Big Eddie, who’s ahead of me now, buying something from a cart. He hands me a little plastic dish of mango ice cream, and we sit on the steps that lead down from the wall. We eat our ice cream with orange plastic spoons shaped like miniature shovels. Big Eddie doesn’t say anything more about Abuela or Papa or his mom. I look up at the black sky. The last of the mango ice cream melts on my tongue and leaves a bitter aftertaste.
11
THE NEXT DAY at lunch, Nita makes meat and more rice and smashed bananas that are called plantains. Even though I like their salty sweetness, they remind me of zucchinis, the way they look like one thing but are actually another. Between mouthfuls I ask Big Eddie again about going fishing.
“It’s a lot of work, hermanito.” He glances at Abuela, who’s hardly eaten anything and seems to be having trouble keeping her eyes open. “I have to find a boat, fishing gear.”
“What about a dock?” I ask.
But Big Eddie shakes his head. “We need a boat. It’s better. How about I take you to the beach instead? It’s just a couple blocks away. La playa?”
Abuela perks up. “La playa,” she repeats, and grins.
Big Eddie and I can’t help giggling when she promptly shuts her eyes again.
“While Abuela has her nap, I’ll take you to the beach,” he whispers.
Abuela opens her eyes and nods approvingly. “La playa,” she repeats.
It’s not fishing, but it’ll do. While Big Eddie helps Abuela with her medicine, I sit on the couch and pull out my phone. I tell Mama that Abuela sends her love and that Big Eddie says hi and that I’m being polite. Then I type a message to Cameron.
My brother’s grandma is really sick. How’s Kamp Kids?
Big Eddie collects three little white bottles filled with pills, and the blender whirrs as Nita makes a green juice for Abuela. My phone pings.
Day camp sucks without any friends. I had to bring a book to keep from dying of boredom. Did you know that fish sleep with their eyes open?
I look up from my phone when Abuela coughs again as she shuffles from the kitchen to her room. She looks at me as she passes the living room, and says, “Tos.”
“Toes,” I repeat, shoving my phone into my pocket. Is she talking about feet? She makes a fake coughing sound and says “tos” again. “Oh, ‘tos,’ ” I say. “That means ‘cough’?”
She smiles like I just won a gold medal. I’m starting to like this little old lady.
* * *
Once Abuela is tucked into bed for her nap, I melt in the heat as I follow Big Eddie along the sidewalk. No one else is out walking.
“It’s the hottest part of the day,” he says when I complain. “Everyone who can rest and relax during the afternoon does.”
What If a Fish Page 6