The ghost Abuela looks up at the stars just like she looked up that night at the plaza. Then she looks back at me.
Abuela and Big Eddie said that Colombia is a magical place, that hats turn into leeches, that there are ghosts. Even though I saw a fish steal Papa’s medal, I still didn’t believe them, but now there is something magical right in front of me.
She blows me a kiss, letting it fall off her fingertips and float down through the leaves of the lemon tree. Now, I know a kiss isn’t a thing you can see, but I swear this kiss—this pinprick of light—leaves her hands and flies through the night air until it lands on my cheek.
* * *
I wake up on the couch in the living room. Big Eddie is standing next to me holding a mug of hot chocolate. His face looks puffy, but he has shaved his stubble. Nita is scrambling eggs for our breakfast as if it were a normal day. I can’t believe I slept through all that racket.
“Rough night?”
I sit up and take the mug. The chocolate is sweet and thick. I’m achy the way I used to be after a soccer match, and my head feels fuzzy and—the ghost. Should I tell Big Eddie?
“I used to sleepwalk when I was younger, especially when I was upset,” Big Eddie says, sitting beside me. “Is that what happened?”
The white parts of my brother’s eyes have red streaks, and the skin on his face sags. I don’t know if telling him I saw a ghost of Abuela will cheer him up or make him sadder.
“Just couldn’t sleep,” I say.
“Lo siento, hermanito,” Big Eddie says.
Then I do something crazy. I lean toward my brother, wrap my arms around his neck, and leave an awkward, brotherly kiss on his cheek.
It feels just as enchanted as Abuela’s.
20
BY THE AFTERNOON, Abuela’s little house is filled with people. She—well, her body—is in a casket in the middle of the living room on the coffee table. Nita makes pot after pot of dark, black coffee, and in between pouring the boiling water over the coffee grounds, she washes cups.
The room echoes with the sounds of tinkling china and whispered cries. “Lo siento,” the visitors say. They are mostly as elderly as Abuela, old friends with white hair. Some of them I recognize from when they came to sit with her. Big Eddie’s friend Arturo arrives on his chugging motorcycle, and the Paredes family from next door come—the kids suddenly shy behind their grandparents. Old ladies that Big Eddie says are Abuela’s cousins pinch my cheeks and say things I don’t understand. I think of the fish at the fountain at the plaza; I feel as out of place as it looked.
The mourners arrive with their arms spread open and trap Big Eddie in hugs, in corners, in conversations. I want to ask him how he’s doing. I want to ask him about the beach and if we did the right thing by bringing Abuela there. At the same time, I want to be alone, curled up in my bed with one of Big Eddie’s Spanish car magazines, but I have to stay in the living room next to Abuela-only-not-Abuela. I start to hate the words “lo siento” and also the scent of the squishy ladies whose grasps I can’t escape.
I think it can’t get any worse, but then we all go to the church. This is worse. Sadder. Lonelier.
The church is strangely cold, and it’s a relief after the sweaty walk from the house through the afternoon sun. Big Eddie and I sit on hard wooden benches, and in front of us a man in a dress (a priest, Big Eddie tells me) speaks in Spanish, using words that I haven’t learned yet. The church smells like damp concrete and rancid perfume. There’s standing and sitting and kneeling. Up, down. The priest talks, shouts, mumbles. I’m so tired, my eyes burn. When I look at the cross hanging on the wall, I see it sway first to the right, then to the left. The casket that men carried to the church seems to be wobbling. The stone walls breathe in and out. I blink hard, and the movement stops.
Then I blink again and start to cry. Not like when I was a little kid and I got mad because I didn’t want to go to bed. This is a different kind of crying. My cheeks are wet. A drop plops onto my lap, but no sound follows. Next to me Big Eddie’s mouth is closed so tightly, his lips almost disappear. His eyes are dry, but his shoulders are shaking. It’s as if my eyes are doing the tears and his body is doing the weeping. It’s like I’m part of my brother and he is part of me, and then I think I’m going to faint even though I don’t know what that feels like.
And then I know I’m going to throw up.
I squeeze past Big Eddie’s shuddering body and run down the center aisle, my shoes clapping on the stone floor. Behind me, the murmur of concerned voices is like the wake behind a boat. I’m not sure where the bathroom is in this church, but the doors open into a garden, where I spot a few pink flowers at the base of a palm tree. That’s where I puke up the eggs Nita made me eat this morning, and the green juice and the pineapple.
When I’m done, I sit on the steps at the front of the church and think about Abuela. Before today, I’d never seen a casket. I’d never been to a funeral before. Well, that’s not true. I remember a blue button-down shirt, a stuffy room, Mama clutching my hand—at what I now realize was Papa’s funeral. I’m thinking about how scratchy the collar of that shirt was, when Big Eddie, followed by the others, leaves the church.
When he see me, he stops. “Are you okay?”
“Are you?”
He takes my hand and pulls me into a hug.
* * *
Later, after the guests from the funeral have left Abuela’s house and the living room is silent, Big Eddie flops onto the couch. At first everyone was crying, dabbing their eyes, holding each other tight enough to strangle a person. But when the sun set, the funeral became a party.
I thought funerals were supposed to be sad. I thought people wore black and talked in soft voices. But here—in Abuela’s house in Cartagena in Colombia—people whose Spanish I couldn’t understand took out their wallets or their phones and showed me pictures of Abuela. Told stories. Someone switched on the radio. “¡Chin-chin!” people said as they clinked their little glasses filled with a Colombian drink called aguardiente. They laughed and then they danced. They danced the cumbia right here in the living room.
It was really something, just like Cameron said about life.
Now glasses and plates are scattered like the leaves in the fall. While Big Eddie sleeps, Nita polishes silver trays and shines the windows. She picks up the cigarette butts left under the lemon tree. I try to help, but she swats the air like I’m an annoying fruit fly.
“No te preocupes, Tito,” she says.
Through all this, Big Eddie sleeps on the couch.
“Big Eddie,” I say, shaking his arm. He can’t spend all night on the couch. “You should go to bed.”
He slowly opens his eyes. “Tito,” he says. He was one of the people drinking aguardiente, and his breath smells like black licorice. “We’re going fishing tomorrow.”
I tug him to his feet. “That’s okay.” I gave up all hope of going fishing in Cartagena. “We don’t have to. I understand.” Mama told me not to be a burden.
“I’m sorry we haven’t gone yet,” he says, his voice thick. “You need to practice for your competition, right?”
I’m surprised he remembered.
“Yes,” I say cautiously. I have too many feelings bumping around inside me. Hope, sadness, excitement. It’s as if a bunch of clumsy fish are competing for the best spot.
“Well, we should go fishing,” Big Eddie says, and then he closes his eyes.
Nita clangs dishes in the kitchen, but it doesn’t stop my brother from collapsing on the couch again. He begins to snore. I give up. I take out my phone. Cameron hasn’t messaged me back yet, but I text her anyway.
My brother is taking me fishing. On. The. Ocean. I will be ready for the tournament.
* * *
Two days after Abuela’s funeral, Big Eddie finds a beautiful boat and also a man—who’s not so beautiful—to drive it. The fishing boat at the wharf is bright red with a white stripe and has two motors hanging off the back end, and a shiny chrome
railing runs along the pointy front. The whole boat is spikey with the fishing rods that are waiting for me. The man, whose name is Johnson, has skin like the sole of a shoe, and he’s missing a pinkie on one hand. He wears the dirtiest cap I’ve ever seen, and a T-shirt with so many holes that it looks like Swiss cheese.
Big Eddie helps Johnson with the gear, and at last we’re off. From my perch on the low curved bench at the front of the boat, I watch the waves. I experiment with standing up. Swaying with the rocking, I head to the back of the boat, where rods with shiny reels are lined up next to different-size nets on handles of varying lengths. The sight of all that gear makes me so excited, my arms and legs won’t be still. I circle Johnson, who stands at the center console, his eyes squinting as he pushes and pulls levers until black plumes of smoke burp into the sky. I return to the front of the boat, then to the rods again. While I pace, Big Eddie is sitting calmly on the bench and barely seems to notice as Johnson revs the engine and we speed out beyond the bobbing heads of swimmers. I stop pacing for a moment, realizing I actually feel happy right now. But I shouldn’t be, should I? The boat careens, and I knock over a stack of buckets like the one that held the leeches. Big Eddie asks if I’m okay, and then he lets a small smile escape his lips while I gather the buckets. I get myself upright and inhale the leftover stink of fish and guts. It’s wonderful. I want to drive a fishing boat when I grow up.
Warm ocean water sprays my face as we head toward the horizon. Behind us the beach becomes a thin brown line, and the houses in Abuela’s neighborhood are nothing but toy blocks.
Big Eddie looks out at the shoreline and takes a deep breath like he’s trying not to be sad, trying to think of other things. “El Castillo.” He points at something large and gray on a hill.
“What?”
“Castle,” he translates.
There’s a pattern across the top of the structure that looks like the Lego castle that Liam and I once built with bright orange and green and blue bricks. I wonder who plays with those Legos now.
“El Castillo San Felipe is five hundred years old,” my brother explains. “A fort. That’s how our people defeated the British. If it weren’t for El Castillo, all of South America would be speaking English now.”
I think of all the Spanish words I know, and all the ones I don’t. I sort of wish the fort hadn’t been quite so successful.
“When I was in school, we visited the castle all the time,” Big Eddie tells me. “We came on excursions—what do you call them?”
“Field trips?”
“Right. We took a field trip there every year, all the kids in our uniforms. It was always hot. But in the tunnels, nice and cool. The tunnels run through the fort and let the soldiers get from one part to another. That way they could surprise the enemy,” Big Eddie says. “They built channels in the stone. Poured boiling oil on the attacking soldiers to burn them. Pretty creative, right?”
“Gross. That’s terrible.” I shudder. The waves jiggle Nita’s scrambled eggs in my belly. Maybe I don’t want to drive a fishing boat.
“Abuela,” Big Eddie says, his voice catching on her name, “she used to say that no matter what it is, it’s important to know your own history.”
If hot oil is part of my Colombian history, I guess it’s good to know. But it seems like the more I know, the more I want to know. Like, how did they ever think of the idea of hot oil? How did they heat the oil? What happened to the people who were burned? I wish I had my encyclopedia. I wish my encyclopedia had all the answers.
“Look.” Big Eddie is pointing again, this time away from shore. In the distance a shape shifts from black to gray against the turquoise of the sky and water. “Do you see the ship?”
I nod. It looks just like a boat I used to play with at the lake.
“And under the water, there are shipwrecks. English ships.” My brother stands like he’s got a sword in his hand again. “Pirate ships.”
Castles and pirates. These weren’t in my encyclopedia or in the books I read for my school report about Colombia. It seems like there’s always more to every story if you look close enough.
Big Eddie lowers his voice. “And dead bodies.” He reaches out and grabs for me, but I scoot away. “Ghosts, probably.”
“Do ghosts swim?”
“Sure, why not?”
I laugh. “What about fish?”
“Fish! ¡Hombre!” Big Eddie cries out like he forgot why we’re here.
The boat skims the waves, leaving white foam in its wake. The castillo gets smaller and smaller. Johnson slows the engine until the churning waves smooth into a lulling rocking. He rummages through a plastic bin on the floor, and he and Big Eddie pull out jiggly silver-and-red octopus-like lures—brightly painted creatures that sparkle with treacherous hooks—and spools of line that glimmer in the light. All the tools to catch a fish. Everything is so much fancier than the stuff in Papa’s fishing tackle. His lures are broken and faded, and his hooks are rusty, a reminder of how long he’s been gone.
I kneel on the floor of the boat and lean over the side, resting my chin on the railing. The water is a swirl of gray and blue and white. Even though I can’t see them, the fish are down there. Dozens of them. Hundreds of them. The one I am going to catch is down there. What if a fish jumps out at me?
The boat lurches on a wave, and my stomach swirls unpleasantly for a moment.
After Johnson laces line through the guides on the rods, he shows me how to grip the handle. This rod is much longer than Papa’s. Big Eddie’s line dances in the ripples of silver water, and I jiggle my own line.
We don’t catch anything at first. Johnson lies on the floor of the boat and puts his dirty cap over his eyes like it’s nap time. Siesta.
Big Eddie stares at the waves, barely paying attention to his line. His eyes are clear, the most alert they’ve been since Abuela died. Something is making him calm. Maybe it’s the boat or the ocean or—maybe it’s me? He’s quiet but in a peaceful sort of way. That’s how I feel too, both of us with our rods and the ocean and the sun and the two of us not talking.
Except. I have so many questions.
“Why did you change your mind? About fishing, I mean?”
“I wanted to catch some fish, Little Eddie.”
I don’t remind him that I want to be called Tito now. “But you didn’t want to go before.”
“Well, I can’t let you go back to Minnesota without you fishing in the Caribbean, hermanito.”
His voice is distant, quiet, like it’s coming through a bad phone connection. I’m glad he’s coming home with me, but I wonder if he’s sad to leave Cartagena. Colombia may not be my home, but, I realize, it’s his. The only home he’s ever known.
“Besides, Abuela wouldn’t want me to change my plans. Taking you fishing was one of them. And me going to college in the US was her dream for me. And she wanted me to look out for you.”
I remember the twin photos—the one at home and the one in Abuela’s album—of Big Eddie, Eduardo Aguado León, and the fish.
“What was it like going fishing with Papa?”
Big Eddie is quiet like he’s thinking very hard. Seawater sprays in his face and moistens his cheeks. “I’m not sure we ever went fishing.”
But I know he did. I saw the picture. The evidence. Abuela has a copy in her photo album. I have one at home in the X-Y-Z volume. Does he not remember, or is he lying? I look at him, but he’s squinting into the horizon.
“Tell me what you remember about him,” I say instead.
“He was tall and had a crazy mustache like an old man.”
“I remember the mustache too.”
“Like Juan Valdez.” Big Eddie laughs.
“Who’s Juan Valdez?” I ask. That’s what Mason Schmidt said too.
“The coffee guy? You know, the one they use to sell Colombian coffee to Americans.”
“You mean the drawings in coffee ads?” On a bag of coffee beans in Mama’s kitchen, a man with a mustache like Papa’s
wears a poncho and rides a donkey. I’ve seen plenty of mustaches here and even a donkey, but no ponchos. I suppose it’s pretty hot in Cartagena.
“Eso,” Big Eddie says. “Sometimes it’s a drawing and sometimes it’s a photo of an actor who plays Juan Valdez.”
“Is he real?”
“What’s real, Little Eddie? They made him up to help sell coffee. Sometimes you can use people’s wrong ideas about you to get them to do what you want.”
Big Eddie pulls his line in and changes lures. He says something to Johnson, but the boat driver doesn’t move from his spot.
“I’m sorry I didn’t take you fishing,” Big Eddie says, casting his line back into the water. Big Eddie reels his line and lets it out. “Antes.”
“Awn-tess?” I repeat. “What does that mean?”
“Antes. ‘Before.’ ”
I frown. Big Eddie means before Abuela died.
We let our lines dance some more. Then I ask, “You know that ghost you told me about?”
“The one I saw when I was a kid?”
“I think I saw a ghost. A woman with long black hair. On the patio.”
Big Eddie is silent.
“I think it was Abuela. She blew me a kiss.”
Then Big Eddie laughs so loud, I almost drop my rod. “It was definitely Abuela.” He’s laughing, but it turns into something choked, almost like crying. “I told you Colombia is a magical place. And you’re a pretty magical kid, Little Eddie.”
“Hey, call me—” Suddenly the shaft of my rod bends and I feel an enormous tug. “What—”
“You got one!” Big Eddie pulls in his own line, and his rod clatters to the floor of the boat. “¡Ándale!”
My rod is yanked into an arc. I lean forward. Something is pulling; something is caught.
“Reel it in!” Big Eddie shouts.
Johnson’s nap is over. As I crank, the boat driver gets the net ready. This is what I’ve been waiting for.
“Don’t let go.” My brother doesn’t have to remind me.
What If a Fish Page 11