The Language of Cherries

by Jen Marie Hawkins

  She crouches beneath my tree,

  twirling a long-handled brush

  between paint-dappled fingers.

  The hint of a smile

  tugs at the periphery

  of her humming mouth

  as she stares forward at a canvas.

  Her complexion absorbs the sunlight,

  and long dark hair

  cascades

  down

  her back.

  She’s like rainforest royalty,

  displaced on top of the world.

  A series of rapid blinks

  won’t reduce her

  to something imagined.

  Splatters of color freckle her clothes

  as if to announce

  she’s here to impress

  nobody at all.

  The light touches her angular face,

  accents the bottom lip

  she chews without apology.

  I lean forward to feed my curiosity

  and knock the bucket

  off the top of the ladder,

  spilling a tidal wave of cherries on the ground.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Evie

  Clanging metal startled Evie from her daze.

  Her feet launched into autopilot, catapulting her vertical. Brown paint splashed across her naked toes and she dropped her brushes next to a pile of pilfered cherries. Trespassing was probably a crime in Iceland too, and an artist’s hunger always made a terrible defense. Glancing down at her disheveled pajamas—Por Dios, she was wearing her pajamas—she gulped a panicked breath.

  Chilly wind squeezed water into her eyes as she spun, searching for the source of the sound. She scanned the beautiful emptiness until, all at once, the void dissipated. Through rivulets of sunbeams, a tall boy stood beneath the knobby knuckles of a low-hanging branch. Four steps and a golden glare separated them.

  Making a tentative move forward, Evie shielded her eyes from the sun.

  Loco shirtless natives think this is warm weather, she thought in the split second it took her to recognize the lines in his stomach—ones she’d painted with painstaking precision only moments ago. Like a road map, she followed those lines north. Well-used arms hung at his sides, one with a familiar tattoo. His damp hair stuck to his face, like he’d come straight from the shower. Or a rainstorm. Or a humid borough of lumberjack heaven. Because damn.

  He wore water-splattered jeans and a curious smile, one exaggerated dimple pitting his left cheek. She opened her mouth to speak, but his thundercloud eyes rendered her mute as Mozart—or was that Beethoven?—despite the symphony playing in her head.

  Maybe she was still asleep. She squeezed her lashes shut, slowly peeking through them after a few moments. Still there. His blond brows pushed a wrinkle of skin together on his forehead.

  “Is it okay if I work here?” Evie finally managed to croak, throat scratchy as sand. “My name is Evelyn. I’ll leave if it’s a problem. I’m just painting.”

  He didn’t respond but kept chomping on the piece of gum in his mouth, dimples flickering as he chewed. He narrowed his eyes as he studied her with a trace of something—irritation?

  She’d read online that Icelanders were shy and reserved, and here she was, face-to-face with one, not only imposing, but looking her absolute worst. She hadn’t even brushed her teeth this morning. She hoped he couldn’t smell her breath. Oh, don’t mind me, the pajama-rama color monster creeping your orchard. She crossed her arms, trying and failing to hide all the skid marks of paint.

  “I’m staying at Fryst Paradis for the summer.” She nodded over her shoulder toward the hill separating the guesthouses from the orchard, hoping he’d look at anything but her. “It’s really pretty over here. I just came to try and capture the beauty.”

  She watched in horror as his gaze traveled to the painting behind her, propped against the fencepost in a pool of sunlight. Like a spotlight of humiliation.

  Capture the beauty might’ve been a poor choice of words, she realized, as he gawked at the painting. His mouth dropped into fly-catcher mode for a split second before he snapped it shut again, a glimpse of green gum frozen on the center of his tongue. Though she could’ve done a leaping swan dive and landed on top of the painting, it was way too late for such acrobatics. He’d seen it, and judging by his startled expression, he wasn’t at all impressed with her stage-five clinger vibe.

  “I can explain…”

  He took a slow step backward, cocking his head to the side the way someone facing a wild animal might.

  “Wait.” She held her hands up. “It’s not what it looks like.” Maybe he couldn’t tell the boy in the painting resembled him a scary lot. She took a peripheral glance at it, then back to him. Crap. Of course the one time it would’ve suited her to paint something all wrong, it didn’t happen. The exactness of the tattoo made it impossible to dismiss as coincidence.

  “Okay, maybe it is what it looks like, but I definitely wasn’t like, stalking you. I can explain.” But could she, really? She wore her awkwardness like a feather boa and tried to imagine his face if she told him she got her inspiration from a dream. That would only level-up her freak status.

  He glanced at the pile of cherry pits on the ground next to her palette. Double crap. Now she was a stalker and a thief. “I’m sorry,” she pleaded. “My papá bought some incredible cherry pie from the store yesterday. It made me want to see this place. Can you just tell the owner that I’ll buy something? I have money. I didn’t mean to cause trouble.”

  He still didn’t speak. Could he even understand English? He flexed his jaw, almost as if his uncertainty had graduated to anger. His eyes flickered from her eyes to her lips, sending a shudder right through all the molecules that made her a girl. Then he peered over her shoulder to the painting.

  “I know it’s—” But before she could utter another breath, he turned his back and stormed down the hill through the trees, fists coiled at his sides.

  “Hey! I said I’m sorry. Do you speak English?” she called behind him, but he didn’t seem to notice. She shook her head, watching him leave. He could’ve said something. Google told her almost all Icelanders spoke a bit of English.

  “Rude,” she muttered before making a beeline to grab her things and scram.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Oskar’s Journal

  Things never go

  the way I imagine they might.

  My brain overrules the southern command

  the minute she opens her mouth.

  It’s not even the painting

  that turns me off most.

  Which says a lot

  considering how long

  she must have been sneaking around.

  Never mind that it’s a very good painting,

  accurate to every minuscule flaw.

  It’s the American mentality

  that triggers my upchuck reflex:

  Take what you want—

  when there’s a problem,

  throw money at it.

  How convenient it must be

  to have that option.

  I wouldn’t know.

  The orchard’s paid off now,

  thanks to money tossed to us by the guilty American

  who caused the accident.

  But we have very little else besides cherries.

  And she was taking those, too.

  Did the fence not tip her off

  that the area’s private property?

  My boots stomp through the sludge.

  The burn of the morning’s scratches

  make me wince as I clench my fists.

  I zigzag through the trees,

  avoiding her gaze

  like a spray of shrapnel.

  Stupid, selfish Americans.

  Of course I can speak English,

  But I’ll never speak it to her.

  As much as I’d like to tell her

  how wrong she is,

  how self-centered and presumptuous,

  she would
only hear broken strings,

  the stammering of missed notes.

  And then she would feel sorry for me.

  Because there are some things

  even money cannot fix.

  She is just as bad

  as the assholes responsible

  for making me

  an

  orphan.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Evie

  “What’d you do today?” Papá asked Evie over dinner without looking at her.

  He strolled into the Fryst Paradis café to meet her at eight. She was trying not to complain. It was better than midnight, at least.

  She shrugged as she pushed a clump of unidentified meat around in her soup—something chunky and brown that looked like it’d already been digested once. Aromas of onion and thyme floated in the steam, eliciting a skeptical growl from her empty—save for the cherries—stomach.

  Happy chatter hummed over the honeycomb windows of the lively little café. The tourists around them were from all over the globe, based on the lilt of their accents. They crowded the mismatched tables and chairs, conversing happily. Though the languages were different, the tones of voices hit a similar note: they were the victorious travelers on the trip of a lifetime.

  Evie envied them. She envied their choices.

  “Mmm, sabroso,” Papá mumbled around a mouthful of the poop soup.

  She’d spent the day re-reading One Hundred Years of Solitude and refreshing her messenger app with the kind of desperation that made it hard to look in a mirror. Maybe she was just as destined to repeat history as the Macandos were. After all, Abuela had been torn from her home and dropped in a foreign land when she was a teenager, too.

  When three video chat calls from her mother had come through, half an hour apart each time, she ignored them. She had no desire to repeat that history. But Evie had no plans to tell her papá any of that.

  “I went and saw the orchard.”

  His eyes widened and he looked at her for the first time since he’d sat down.

  “Well?” He dropped his spoon in the bowl and suspended his oil black eyebrows in perma-surprise. “Did you paint?”

  Evie’s nostrils flared. Could mystery boy have tattled to the store owner, which resulted in a phone call to Papá? Saying yes would invite him to ask to see the painting, though, and she’d already met her quota for embarrassment today. She shook her head, risking the lie, and made a note to start keeping a written tally of things to bring up in her next confessional. Not that she was always 100% honest with the priest, but her sins were beginning to pile up.

  “It’d be a beautiful scene, I think.” He wiped dripping soup from his mouth. “Why aren’t you eating?”

  “The food’s weird here, Papá.” Evie rolled her eyes. “Everything is weird here.”

  The way his face fell, wrinkles in the corners of his eyes pointing down instead of up, mouth settling in a drooping arch, sent a jolt of guilt all the way to the tip of her empty soup spoon. Sometimes she forgot he was still grieving her mother’s absence, blaming himself for not making her happy. Not that anyone could ever make her mother happy.

  “I liked the cherry pie, though.” Evie did her best to say it in a hopeful tone.

  He nodded. “They serve lunch over there too, and they have homemade salsas and jams. I think I’ll stop tomorrow on my way back and get some.”

  “I’ll get it,” she blurted, then lowered her voice and peered around to see if anyone noticed her alarm. They hadn’t. “I mean, it was nice to get out of the house today. I don’t mind going.” No way could she let him find out she’d already made an enemy on her very first excursion. “Anyway, where do you have to go tomorrow? Aren’t we going to Mass?”

  A sigh deflated him. “I’m sorry, mija. Research is weather dependent, and the forecast changed. Chance of rain is slim to none.” He offered an apologetic shrug.

  Abuela had raised Papá to attend Mass religiously, pun intended. It was one of those obligatory things Evie just accepted with a resigned sense of dread. So it made very little sense how much it bummed her out that she’d miss it for the second week in a row.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Oskar’s Journal

  Within these pages lives my solace.

  It’s the only place I can share my thoughts

  without having to avoid sounds

  that seize in my throat

  or get caught on repeat.

  From the time I learned to talk

  my brain has moved faster than my mouth.

  Words get clogged up

  as they press against the back of my teeth.

  I’m an alien

  flying under the radar

  on a fluent planet,

  but everyone knows it when I speak.

  Music is my only refuge,

  because when I sing,

  my strings aren’t broken.

  When I was little,

  the speech therapist told Mamma

  to encourage me to sing

  for this reason.

  So I write my words here

  between these pages

  where they hang, ripe for the plucking,

  and only sing them

  when I want to be heard.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Evie

  Alone in her room the next day, Evie cast sidelong glances at her painting.

  Humiliation aside, it was an impressive depiction, if she did say so herself. Maybe she’d seen the boy at some point since she got to Iceland but hadn’t noticed. Like when she had first arrived. Or when she rode to town with Papá for groceries. The only reason he even seemed interesting is because she’d cooked up this idea that she saw him in her mind before she met him.

  Because it wasn’t like that was something that could actually happen. She wasn’t Miss Izzy from the El Rey strip mall in Little Havana. She didn’t peer into a clear plastic bowl full of dollar store marbles and see the future. Then again, neither did Miss Izzy, if she was being technical about it. Miss Izzy told Evie a few days before she left Miami that she’d meet a kind and handsome boy and that she’d never stray far from home. What a crock of lies that had been.

  Maybe Miss Izzy should’ve splurged for the more expensive marbles at the flea market, since her vision only got one detail right. She threw on a pair of jeans and a hoodie and dug her fingers through her hair, like she could scrub the thought of him away. Maybe he was nice looking in that brawny, could-lift-a-Volkswagen sort of way, but his personality left a ton to be desired. Kind of like Ben. Were all boys such insufferable assholes? She’d have to get Abuela’s input on that.

  He’d claimed enough of her curiosity for one day, so she pulled up iTunes and clicked a playlist of reggae tunes. A happy Bob Marley beat flooded the guesthouse silence. His music always made her think of Abuela. It was the one musical compromise they had no trouble making. Abuela felt a kinship with him because she’d read in the papers that he too had fled to Miami as a refugee. She’d seen him live once at Jai-Alai Fronton in the 1970s, and she never tired of telling that story. Her dark eyes got three shades lighter each time.

  Alberto was but a niñito, Evie, but I carried him on my hip through the concert crowd. I was empty from your abuelo’s departure back to Cuba. But when the music began, the notes filled all that vacant space in my heart. There was a spiritual healing in his message and the way he moved as the words rolled through him. It was a positive vibration, indeed, nieta.

  Keeping her hands busy, Evie unpacked clothes—something she’d been putting off to delay the reality of this summer sentence in the cold. She hung sweaters, folded pajamas, and shoved bras in the small white armoire with a too-short leg. It rocked and thumped on the floor each time she opened a drawer. As she searched for something to stick under it, the messenger screen dinged on her laptop.

  She stumbled and nearly ate hardwood trying to get to little desk next to the bed. Pressing pause on the music, she opened the messenger screen.

  Ben Be
nson: Sup girl? Hows the North Pole?

  Wrong location again. But God, at least he was talking to her. That’s more than she could say for any of the other people she’d encountered lately. She sank into a chair and glanced at the painting again.

  Evelyn Perez: Spectacular! I met some locals yesterday. Thinking of hiking the rim of a volcano this weekend.

  And by hiking the rim of a volcano, she meant going to buy cherry jam. She refused to let him know how lame her day—scratch that, entire trip—had been.

  Ben Benson: Right on.

  She grumbled and stared at the blinking cursor, trying to think of something interesting to say to keep the conversation going. The blank grew in her head like spilled white paint.

  A purple notification box popped up on the screen.

  Loretta Devereaux is now online.

  Panic shoved her into typing another message. She had to get his attention back.

  Evelyn Perez: I’ve been thinking about that night.

  There. She smiled to herself. She’d put that in his mind. Maybe it’d be a convenient segue into a clarification conversation: Are you my boyfriend? She wasn’t sure if she’d be able to ask him like that, outright. But she wanted to. She needed to know where they stood, and she hated that she hadn’t cleared it up before she left. They’d been on a few dates—mostly group excursions after work. Were those even dates? They were before the kiss, so she wasn’t sure. Now that she thought about it, her doubts doubled down.

  She waited. And waited. And waited some more. Finally, she gave up and clicked on Loretta’s name, promising herself she’d resist the urge to ask about her grub-grab with Ben.

  Evelyn Perez: Hey stranger.

  The response was instant.

  Loretta Devereaux: Hey girl! How are you?! Do you love it there?

  She thought for a moment. What would impress Loretta? She chose her words carefully.

  Evelyn Perez: It’s amazing! Wish you were here, though. Going to hike a volcano tomorrow.