The Language of Cherries

by Jen Marie Hawkins

  “Mamá, you’re getting confused again. That’s Rhona who wanted to be an actress. Not Evie.”

  “Oh, Alberto, be quiet. I was talking to Rhona, not you!”

  The argument became louder and more heated as it progressed. She was exhausted just watching them. But more than anything, she was sad. How could Abuela mistake her for Rhona, even for a moment? Maybe she could jog her memory somehow.

  “Did you get the package I sent, Abuela?” Evie interrupted. She felt a little silly for not checking on that sooner.

  Abuela looked up at the screen again, train of argument lost for a moment.

  “You sent her a package?” Papá asked.

  Evie nodded. “Did you get it?”

  Abuela looked around, as if she would find it next to her. “Yes, yes of course,” she said, uncertainty trembling in her smile. “Gracias.”

  “What did you send?” Papá asked, an edge of irritation in his voice.

  It’s not like she had to tell him every single thing she did. It didn’t concern him. Nothing but his job concerned him.

  “Baked goods,” she answered, purposely leaving out the contraband items. She was certain he wouldn’t be happy about those, if he knew.

  “The bread was delicious, Rhona.” Abuela kissed her fingers with a grin. Some recognition set in, but not enough. At least she had received her package.

  Evie’s throat burned.

  “We have to go now, Mamá,” Papá said to her. Running diversion. “But we’ll talk again this week, okay?”

  Abuela nodded. “Adios.”

  The nurse leaned over and picked up the laptop, Abuela’s face suddenly replaced by a scrub-top pattern and a swirling background again. Once in the hallway, the nurse spoke to the camera.

  “She’s just having a difficult day today,” she said, false reassurance selling itself out in her voice. “We’ll try again later in the week.”

  Papá nodded. “Thank you for doing that.”

  “No problem.”

  Evie had approximately thirty seconds before she melted into incoherent sobs, so she stood and headed toward the door before it could happen.

  “Evie, wait—” Papá called to her as he disconnected the call. She didn’t wait, though. She grabbed her hat and scarf and headed to the only place that felt safe anymore.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  Oskar’s Journal

  When I come downstairs from my room,

  carrying my ukulele bag over my shoulder

  I find Agnes’s note next to the cash register.

  Gone to a show with Edvin, be back late.

  At the back of the store,

  a painting sits on the easel

  in a pool of recessed lighting.

  It’s the one she was working on yesterday,

  when I crept up behind her

  and inhaled her words before she could speak them.

  It’s a hand,

  dripping with water,

  holding a locket.

  A silver locket with a broken lobster clasp.

  As far as I know,

  my father never found it.

  But maybe he did.

  Maybe he gave it back to her.

  Maybe she was wearing it that day,

  and I just didn’t notice.

  Maybe it was stowed away in her purse,

  some future trip to a jeweler

  that would never be taken.

  I hoist it from the easel

  and haul it out the side door,

  locking up behind me.

  As I pass the pond

  on my way to the lighthouse,

  I hear something.

  Quiet crying.

  I freeze when I locate

  the source of the sound.

  The retreating sunlight hides her

  in the shadow of a large stone.

  She’s on the ground at the water’s edge,

  face buried against her knees,

  dark hair cloaking her like a curtain.

  Once I’m in front of her,

  I don’t remember the walk over.

  Like I usually don’t remember

  the ride home from Bjorn’s.

  Muscle memory.

  I just go to where I belong.

  As I kneel in front of her,

  setting the painting

  and my ukulele

  on the ground,

  she looks up.

  Her eyes have puffy wet rings around them.

  Tangled lashes mat against her lids.

  She wipes the end of her red nose

  with her sleeve.

  She didn’t remember me.

  Her voice quivers.

  It’s been less than six weeks, and she didn’t even know my name.

  I reach for her,

  and she dives into my arms.

  Papá was right—she’s deteriorating fast.

  She mumbles against my chest,

  words barely coherent.

  By the time I leave New York, she’ll forget I ever existed.

  She shakes against me,

  and we stay like that for a long time,

  on the wet ground,

  huddled together against the icy breeze.

  When she finally pulls back,

  I want to kiss her,

  but I don’t.

  Instead, I wipe the wetness

  from her eyes with my thumbs.

  She rewards me with a weak smile.

  Abuela is the only person who ever really knew me.

  She pulls her hair off of her face,

  twirls it into a rope,

  and lets it drop over her left shoulder.

  I’m not myself with anyone else.

  My mother. My friends. My Papá.

  But Abuela is the only person I didn’t have to pretend around.

  With everyone else, I’m a fraud.

  I’m weak and I fake it and I’m too cowardly to just say what I’m thinking.

  She’s wrong, though.

  She’s the most real person I’ve ever met.

  I could tell her that right now.

  I feel the weight of the do-or-die moment.

  The heaviness subsides

  as it passes me by.

  If I tell her now,

  after all this time,

  that I understood her all along,

  it’ll only ruin everything between us.

  We don’t have much time left as it is.

  I can’t hurt her more than she’s already hurting.

  But maybe I can make her understand

  somehow

  she isn’t alone.

  That I’m here for her.

  I pull my ukulele out of the carrying case.

  Prop it against my chest,

  and play the opening melody

  of a song

  I know she’ll know.

  Her frown lifts by millimeters

  as the notes surround us.

  I sing the words in my head.

  No woman, nuh cry…

  She sniffles as I play,

  smiling through her tears.

  She makes me

  want to play

  on and on

  until everything’s better.

  When I finish the song,

  she dives in.

  Kisses me

  until we have to come up for air.

  She glances at the painting

  that I propped against the rock.

  What are you doing with my painting?

  she asks, breathless.

  I stand and reach for her hand.

  If I can’t tell her

  the whole truth,

  maybe I can show her

  some of it.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  Evie

  Evie held his hand as they walked around the pond, his ukulele slung between them, her painting under his other arm.

  He led her to the lighthouse and opened the heavy arched door, motioning her
inside. This was significant. Agnes had told her this was his private place, his hideaway.

  She stepped into the trapped briny air. A faint light spilled in from the top of a massive spiral brick staircase. He took her hand again, and they walked up the steps for miles. Orange light poured in through the portholes extending every few feet all the way to the top. When they reached a landing, Evie looked through one of them, squinting against the retreating sunset as it kissed the ocean goodnight.

  She followed Oskar up a ladder into a square-shaped hole.

  What she found there made her equilibrium swirl. It was like crawling into another world.

  The room that housed the light itself—which Agnes mentioned hadn’t functioned in years—had been converted into a living area overlooking a panoramic view of the sea. Floor-to-ceiling windows faced them, 180 degrees around. Piles of music books were organized on makeshift bookshelves where the old light used to be. An ancient record player sat in one corner, next to a cabinet full of vinyl records with framed photos on top. Instruments were scattered about—a drum on an empty shelf, guitars of various sizes in separate stands on the floor, a harmonica tossed on a mattress that was covered in a down blanket and armloads of mismatched pillows. The place could’ve been a two-page spread in an Ikea catalog if it weren’t so dusty. The Musician’s Loft by the Sea, they’d call it.

  Behind them, a wooden door led to a small bathroom. Evie turned, admiring the view, but what hung on the back wall stunned her into silence.

  Evie turned to him, a shaky realization tingling through her words. “You bought my paintings?” Every single one of them hung neatly on display, with the exception of the one he’d set on the floor at their feet. An inexplicable fluttering took root in her chest. Tears filled her eyes.

  She wandered around the small space, mouth agape, touching the paintings, running her fingers over the vinyl records, picking up a photo that rested on top of the cabinet.

  Inside a gold frame, six people stared back at her. Two of them she recognized. Agnes stood on one end of the pose, younger and thinner, clutching a short, stout man with a mustache—the man from the picture she’d shown her. Finn. Beside him, a tall and skinny bearded man with a severe frown draped a lanky arm around a beautiful red-haired woman with a silver locket around her neck. It took Evie less than a blink to realize they were all subjects from her paintings. The two young boys who stood in front were Oskar and his brother.

  Evie’s hands shook. Oskar reached over and took the frame from her, and then set it back on the shelf. “That’s your family.” Her whisper wasn’t a question. He nodded like he understood. “That’s why you bought all my paintings.”

  The spell found a way.

  When Oskar didn’t cooperate with Agnes’s plans, the tree had shared waking dreams of his family with her instead. It wanted her to know. Wanted her to paint them for him. Despite all of her Cs in art class and uncertainty about herself as an artist, she knew she was the only person who could’ve painted these images for him.

  For the first time since she’d lounged on Abuela’s porch swing, she was in exactly the place she was supposed to be. Maybe everything really did have meaning. Maybe losing Ben and Loretta and being forced to Iceland for the summer was exactly what was supposed to happen. Fighting it had made no difference, because here she was. And somehow, standing in front of her now, with big tattooed arms and messy hair and crooked bottom teeth and perfectly asymmetrical dimples, was her silver lining. Maybe they couldn’t talk to each other, in the basic sense of the word. But they both spoke the language of cherries.

  She stepped into him and kissed him until she couldn’t breathe.

  They wound up on the mattress, rolling around until darkness fell—which happened sometime after 10 p.m. now, as the summer faded and the earth hurtled toward the fall equinox. Everything in this beautiful, foreign landscape happened fast and intense. Summer burned bright every single evening, until the seasons whiplashed into change.

  His hands stayed in her hair—the kind of restraint she didn’t know boys were capable of. When they came up for air, a lazy smile stretched across Oskar’s lips. He lit the wood stove next to them with a long match from the bookshelf, and then shut the iron door. Warmth swam through the cavernous space of the lookout tower.

  Evie collapsed backwards on the pillows and looked up at the sky. She noticed a green tinge faraway, above the clouds, so she focused on it for a moment, testing her imagination. She watched as the green grew into a swirling ribbon that cut across the sky and disappeared again.

  Another match struck next to her. Oskar shook the fire away and took a drag, cherry end burning brightly as he did. Nerves flooded her belly when he passed it to her. She could’ve said no. She’d already done it once; she knew what it was like, so she couldn’t blame curiosity anymore.

  It wasn’t curiosity that beckoned her this time; it was the desire to join him in oblivion. To forget that this had to end. She took it from him and drew a deep breath. Followed by raucous coughing. She could never make this look cool. Once her lungs had settled, she turned her attention skyward again. Through patchy clouds, she could make out constellations with the accuracy of an amateur astrologer. Miss Izzy had taught her a little bit about the stars.

  “That’s Orion’s belt there.” She pointed. “And there’s Cassiopeia. Or is that Taurus?” She squinted, amazed that she could identify the same constellations from Iceland that she could from Florida. The world seemed smaller when she looked up at the sky, which ironically made the things she wanted seem more attainable. Made the distance feel less impossible.

  The clouds floated apart, slowly, as they watched, inhaling and exhaling. Coughing and giggling. As the sky opened up to an orchestra of starlight, the edge of color that had hinted before stepped out to center stage.

  “I didn’t know you could see the Northern Lights in August,” she said. Though she’d never seen them in person before, it didn’t feel like the first time. She’d painted them just weeks before, and the memory residue lingered in her brain as a result. Oskar moved beside her, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the sky.

  A gentle melody played on the strings of an acoustic guitar, the same song he’d been playing the first night she heard him by the fire. As he played the song, the green ribbons twirled slowly, dancing with lavender partners to the tune. Evie lifted her hands above her head and made a triangle, closing one eye and framing snapshots of the cosmos—to paint later.

  All of her worries were like the distant stars. She knew they existed, but somewhere far away. Nothing mattered in that moment but the warmth and the starlight and the music. And, she had to admit, the boy.

  Evie turned over on her side and shifted her gaze to him. She propped her head on her hand and admired the way his forearm flexed as he strummed the strings. He held it differently than he’d held the ukulele, but the song was the same.

  His lashes kissed his cheekbones, eyes closed, mouth slightly open, as he melted into the melody. He played with the desperate intensity of a true artist, someone who had to play to survive. Evie knew that feeling. It’s exactly what music did to her, exactly the feeling she had when she painted. Her paintings in Iceland were the only ones not composed to music. Maybe that was because he was meant to be her music. She knew his songs before he ever sang them. Knew his pain and his passion without him ever putting them into words.

  When the song was over, his eyes opened and a hazy smile brightened the darkness of the room. It was the kind of smile you only share when you know exactly what the other person is thinking. That terrified Evie, because if he could read her thoughts...

  Oskar made no move to close the distance between them. Instead, he stood and went over to the old phonograph and vinyl collection. He sunk to the floor in front of the cabinet and began flipping through until he landed on one with a shiny red cover. He placed it on the turntable and began cranking the handle coming from the back of it. It made a clicking, popp
ing, squeaking sound as he worked. When he met resistance, he stopped.

  He dropped the needle, and the song began to play through a gentle crackle of static. He crawled across the floor, onto the mattress with her. Evie concentrated on the sky again, to keep herself from saying or doing anything stupid. Though she’d been with him all evening, for some reason, this moment felt heavier than the rest. Like one move would propel them in some direction they couldn’t come back from.

  The acoustic song on the phonograph played distant and quiet, and not in English. But there was something beautiful and romantic about it. She wished she knew what they were saying. She turned her head and met Oskar’s gaze.

  “Agnes said you sing,” she said. “Syngja. Is that the right word?” She knew it was right, because she’d read her downloaded copy of Basic Icelandic for Idiots a dozen times now, and that word was one of the easier ones. She always doubted herself when she had to say something he’d actually understand.

  Oskar just stared down at her, gray eyes piercing her through the darkness. He lifted his right hand to her face and covered her eyes, gently brushing his fingertips over her lids.

  “You want me to close my eyes? Okay.” Evie obliged, settling into the nook of his shoulder.

  When the chorus of the song reached its peak again, a deep baritone rumble moved through Oskar’s chest and into Evie’s ear. Suddenly his mouth was making sounds and singing along to the words in the most hauntingly beautiful cadence she’d ever heard. She didn’t need to know what the words meant to feel them. The vibration of the syllables traveled through every nerve ending in her body, and before the song was done, she opened her eyes and lifted her head to watch him sing the last measure. Eyes closed, throat moving, lips dancing.

  How was she supposed to say goodbye to him?

  Leaving Iceland would be almost as hard as leaving Abuela had been. She had belonged here this summer just as much as she’d belonged in Florida before she left. She didn’t want to think about where she’d belong next. She just wanted to stay here in this moment with this boy who listened to her and made her feel.

  The song stopped and the needle made a clicking noise as it returned to its resting point. He opened his eyes and looked at her, holding her gaze only a moment before she rested her head on his shoulder. Green flames sizzled through the sky above, as if the whole world was on fire because of this thing between them.