The Language of Cherries

by Jen Marie Hawkins

  All the pain I’ve caused registers there,

  scrolling between us like sky writing.

  ¡Dale! ¡Apúrate!

  He yells again and shoves her downward,

  following immediately behind.

  Agnes’s chest rises and falls

  as she scans the room,

  sees the evidence lying on the floor.

  She turns to me,

  voice dripping with disdain,

  and says,

  I hope you’re happy.

  As I swallow the bitterness,

  I realize something.

  I was happy.

  Last night.

  But like everything

  I’ve ever let myself love,

  it’s gone now.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  Evie

  Evie packed up everything in her summer room that she once viewed as a cell.

  Now she only wanted to stay here and pretend the rest of the world didn’t exist—but only if she could just go back and un-make some mistakes. If Abuela didn’t survive, she’d have to carry that blame alone. Screw the rules, she’d thought when she sent her that candle. God, how could she have been so stupid? Her stomach coiled into tight knots as she filled her last suitcase.

  She pulled the only remaining sweater from the closet and stared at the two paintings she hadn’t sold. The very first one, of Oskar in the orchard, and then the one she’d painted after that night by the fire: his arm, strumming chords.

  She couldn’t let her father see these.

  The walk of shame down all those flights of steps had been the longest of her life. Her arm would be bruised from Papá’s grip, she was certain. I’d march you straight to church right this instant if there were time, he’d spat in her ear in Spanish. Her eyes burned just thinking about it. She decided, in that moment, that maybe Quiet Papá was less scary after all.

  At least I was smart enough to use protection, she’d wanted to say. In what universe was he anyone to judge her, anyway? Abuela, though—she’d have a right to be disappointed in her. She’d been the one to have the sex talk with her when she was thirteen. Don’t you dare take it lightly, nieta, she’d said.

  What if Abuela didn’t make it? What if she did, and Papá told her everything?

  She lifted her pillow and noticed the silver locket, where she’d kept it since she found it in the water. She had assumed it was a sign from the universe—some magical message like the ones from the tree, telling her Oskar was going to be her first love. After seeing the pictures inside the lighthouse, she knew that it had belonged to his mother.

  It wouldn’t be right to keep it.

  She glanced up at her paintings, not knowing what to do with them, either. Every worry in her head began to snowball. What if she never saw him again? Swallowing a lump in her throat, she walked over and quietly clicked the lock on her door. She slid the locket in her back pocket and gathered the paintings, dropping them on her stripped mattress while she raised the window. Without thinking, she crawled out, and then reached through and grabbed the paintings when her feet hit the ground.

  Maybe he’d understood her all along. Her assumption was that he didn’t speak English, but maybe he just didn’t speak it aloud. She didn’t understand why Agnes wouldn’t have just told her that, but there had to be a reason. Those words in that journal were English. And if he didn’t write them, who did?

  She had to know the truth. Or at least let him know her truth. Whatever it was between them was real, and she couldn’t walk away from him without saying it, without telling him she didn’t regret a single thing that happened between them. Her feet crunched the crispy grass in the path she’d worn between the guesthouse and the orchard in the weeks since she’d first seen it—seen him. He was always the reason she went. It was never the cherries, or the lure of the orchard, or the smell in Agnes’s shop. Those things were just added bonuses. Excuses to keep going back.

  She rushed into the shop but found it dark and silent. The closed sign was turned. Only the side door was unlocked. Her eyes scanned the shelves in the dim light—one lone bulb in the souvenir section at the back of the shop cast a glow. Despite the perfect alignment of the products on the full shelves, the deep shades of red against wood grain, it all looked hollow and empty without Oskar and Agnes.

  “Oskar?” she called, though her voice was hoarse and weak. She called again, this time a little louder. “Agnes?”

  Nothing.

  She set her paintings down and took the stairs, two at a time, holding the cool rail to help her climb. She called for them again as she made it to the top. But she only met more silence and a deeper darkness.

  Tears welled up as scenarios played in her mind. She was running out of time, and if they weren’t here, then she might not have a chance to tell them goodbye, to see them one last time and clear things up.

  She flung the first door open, and light spilled onto the catwalk of the upper level. Inside, vacant instrument cases lay strewn all over the floor, along with sheet music and half empty water bottles and discarded clothes. A forgotten bed frame held no mattress. It hit her then—this was his room, but he’d taken his mattress to the lighthouse. Maybe she’d find him there.

  Evie grabbed her things at the bottom of the stairs. She crashed back through the door into the orchard, searching, the paintings constantly slipping from her grasp. She stopped and used her knee to pull them back into her arms every few feet as she ran. Her Papá would be looking for her any minute now. He’d notice she was gone, and this would be the first place he’d look.

  She jogged past the pond where they’d first kissed. The wind swirled in her ears as she approached the lighthouse, but the sound of conversation interrupted the wind. A voice got louder as she approached, one she’d only ever heard once, but in a language this time that ironically seemed foreign to her ears.

  “She’s a t-t-tourist!” The voice exploded. Evie stopped cold. “It’s d-d-d-done.”

  “Oskar, you have an opportunity here to do the right thing, to make it right before it’s too late. Don’t ye see that?” Agnes’s back was to Evie, but she could tell by her posture she was pleading on her behalf. In English, of course. He understood. He always understood.

  “There’s nnnothing to muh-muh-make right. It’s nnnothing. She was always going to lllleave.” He shrugged off Agnes’s suggestions with such adamancy.

  The most horrible part was that it was true.

  He was right; she was always going to leave. As the wind continued to batter her, she could barely feel it. Everything went devastatingly numb as the realization blew through the valley of her heart, leaving wreckage in its path. All of the things she felt over the course of the summer. The things she felt last night… it was nothing to him. None of it was real. He’d known she was leaving, and he let it happen anyway. He didn’t even care enough to make sure they got to say goodbye.

  Evie sucked in a breath and steeled herself, letting the numbness propel her forward. She dropped the paintings at her feet. They made a thudding noise against the rocky footing. Agnes and Oskar both turned and saw her there, faces suddenly frozen to stone.

  “Liars. Both of you.” Her voice cracked when she said it, dangerously close to tears. She wouldn’t let them see her cry. All the fury she felt over hearing him so callously shrug her off—she’d slept with him, for God’s sake!—combined with the uncertainty of Abuela’s future, the uncertainty of her own future, balled into an avalanche of anger. Heat replaced the numbness. Evie stomped toward Oskar. His face betrayed no emotion. He just stared at her as she approached, unmoving. She stopped a foot from him, pushing all of that fury into a bullseye on his forehead, and waited. She understood now how someone could want to hit him.

  “You have nothing to say to me?” she asked when the silence had stretched on too long. All the things she’d said to him all summer… she’d told him her deepest, darkest feelings and desires. She’d given herself to him in ev
ery possible way. He owed her a sentence, at the very least.

  But Oskar just tensed his jaw and swallowed, Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. Emotion snuck onto his face then and he grimaced beneath the weight of what looked like humiliation. He said nothing.

  Evie reared back and slapped him across his beautiful, deceitful face. His head jerked to the side, absorbing the impact. She instantly wished she’d hit him harder. It wasn’t as satisfying as she’d hoped it would be.

  “You can’t just use people!” Her voice erupted panicked, screaming, and unfamiliar to her own ears. “Pushing away the people who care about you won’t bring your family back.” A sob rattled around in her chest. He stared at the ground, refusing to look up. This was it—the cold hard truth. He didn’t feel the same thing she did. He’d fooled her with his silent charm. She could hit him and scream at him all day, but nothing would change that fact.

  She took the locket out of her back pocket and hurled it at him. It smacked him in the chest and fell to the ground at his feet.

  “I found that in the pond. You can add it to your shrine.” She turned and stomped past the paintings on the ground, leaving them behind. He didn’t stop her. Agnes stood helpless, watching her go.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

  Oskar’s Journal

  I am a fuck up.

  This is what people get for believing in me.

  This is what I get

  for trying to be anything

  but a fuck up.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

  Evie

  The next forty-eight hours were a blur of near-intolerable emotion for Evie.

  When Iceland disappeared beneath her feet, covered quickly by wispy clouds, she stared out the freezing window of the plane and let hot tears warm her face.

  If she’d learned nothing else this summer, it was that she couldn’t trust her instincts about anything. Not about Abuela’s condition, and not about the intentions of others. Even Agnes! Agnes had willfully lied, covered for him. That betrayal hurt almost as much as Oskar’s.

  She catalogued every moment of her summer on the five-hour flight to Boston. Was there a sign at any point? An explanation that should’ve tipped her off? She couldn’t think of any. She only remembered the things he did to reinforce her feelings for him. That first night by the fire. The days in the orchard. The fact that he’d bought every single one of her paintings. The look in his eyes in the lighthouse—if that wasn’t love, she’d never be able to identify it. She had felt it, so clearly. But maybe what she’d been feeling was the love he had for his family. Perhaps he’d misplaced it on her because of the paintings.

  Every attempt she made to sleep was thwarted by the raw churning beneath every inch of her skin. So she remained awake and endured it. Her ears popped so violently on descent that it shook her from her melancholy for a few moments, almost welcome compared to the pain of simply breathing.

  To make matters worse, the connecting flight to Miami didn’t leave until 4:55 the following morning. They had a six-hour layover. She couldn’t sleep in the cold, hard airport chair, either, while people banged luggage against her legs.

  Papá only spoke to her in snappy, incomplete sentences. He snored intermittently beside her as the clock ticked by like a torture device. Precious seconds and minutes and hours. Now that they were back in the States, she could feel every mile between herself and Abuela, every moment that she wasn’t by her side.

  After another plane, and another five hours in the air, they were finally on the way to the hospital. A new worry rose to the surface: she would see Abuela, but how would she look? Would she even look the same? Would her injuries have destroyed the warmth around her eyes? The delicate skin of her hands?

  As they drove to the hospital in the late morning sunshine—which looked worlds apart from the sunshine in Iceland—Papá told her for the fifth time how disappointed he was in her, and how they’d deal with her actions as soon as Abuela got better.

  If Abuela got better.

  When they entered Miami-Dade General, Evie took shallow breaths, trying unsuccessfully to avoid the antiseptic stench that burned the inside of her nose. Breathing through her mouth didn’t help either. Her stomach dropped more dramatically than usual in the elevator. She was an exposed nerve, susceptible to every tactile sensation, despite her sleep-starved brain. When the automatic doors opened, she hurtled down the hall alongside Papá into the unit. Toward the door with Perez on the whiteboard.

  This was it.

  A young doctor met them at the doorway and offered his hand as he introduced himself to Papá. He opened the door, and their quiet, polite conversation drowned in the chorus of beeps from the various machines surrounding Abuela.

  Evie went straight to her bedside, and her eyes filled for the hundredth time in a day. A soul-deep wrenching nearly made her collapse. Beneath a mound of white sheets and blankets was Abuela, with lines and needles connected to her as if she were an alien experiment. The swelling around her face made her virtually unrecognizable. Her normally smooth brown skin was covered in splotches, like someone had flung pink paint on her while she slept. Which seemed much less violent and intrusive than what had actually happened.

  A large plastic tube was taped to the outside of her mouth. Evie couldn’t imagine how badly it hurt, or how Abuela could breathe with that thing going down her throat. She listened to the whoosh of the machine next to her as she realized that Abuela wasn’t breathing. The machine was breathing for her.

  I did this.

  Evie wanted to fall on the ground and sob. To beg God to forgive her for every stupid thing she’d done this summer. For her selfishness, her recklessness. But it wouldn’t change anything now.

  “She’s improving,” the young doctor said to them. “The swelling has diminished substantially.”

  If this was substantial improvement… Her stomach clenched and rolled.

  “If she continues to improve at this rate,” the doctor continued, “we’ll go ahead and try to extubate her this evening. By the end of the week, depending on how she does, we’ll start thinking about discharge goals.”

  Looking at her now, Evie wasn’t so sure. Because despite what the doctor was saying, she’d never seen Abuela like this. So sick and defenseless and old. Her hair hadn’t been that gray a couple of months ago, she was sure of it. Instead of a few gray sprigs at her forehead and around her ears, the gray had crept all the way up the crown of her head. The black was sparse and hidden underneath all the silver.

  Maybe life moved faster as a person got closer to the end. Everything blurred. The background noise sunk further into the abyss. Evie had to cross her arms tightly across her chest to keep from flinging herself into the bed with Abuela and begging her to be okay.

  “I don’t know where we’ll put her after recovery,” Papá grumbled, hunched in a defeated posture. “I can’t believe the incompetence of a health care team that’d give a candle to someone with dementia as progressive as hers.”

  A lump formed in Evie’s throat. She hadn’t told him that it was all her fault. How could she? If he didn’t hate her already, he would once he learned that little nugget of truth.

  “I’m definitely going to speak to a lawyer about it.” A lawyer? Evie’s heart skipped a beat. “Someone has to pay for all of this.” He motioned to the machines and the hospital bed and circled the room with his finger in a 360-motion.

  The young doctor stared down at his clipboard, seeming uncomfortable.

  She glanced over at him as he ran his hands through his greasy black hair, anxiety etched into the lines of his face like they were drawn with permanent marker. It hit Evie then. This was an inconvenience to her Papá. It interrupted his work, his life, his bank account. Despite the fact that his mother was suffering in a hospital bed in front of him, he was worrying about how he was going to pay for it all. Maybe those tears he shed before they left were for his wallet.

  Anger elbowed the sorrow out of the way, and
Evie sniffed. Stood up a little straighter. She’d wait until the doctor left, and then she’d tell him the truth. He’d already planned to dump her off on a woman who wanted her dead before she was ever born. She didn’t care if he hated her now.

  The door clicked open behind them. They both turned to see the new person, and the bottom dropped out of Evie’s stomach when she saw the familiar white-blond hair, the newly happy made-up face.

  Evie whirled on her Papá with a hiss. “What’s she doing here?”

  “Could you recommend a list of facilities we could look into post discharge?” Papá asked the doctor, ignoring Evie.

  “Certainly.” The doctor clutched his clipboard to his chest. “I’ll make sure the nurse gets it to you as soon as possible. Try and get some rest and I’ll see you all tomorrow.”

  Evie could feel her standing behind her, her presence a negative force that might suck her up like a vacuum. She refused to turn around. Why would he call her and have her come here? She couldn’t begin to understand.

  When the door clicked behind the doctor, Rhona spoke. “She looks terrible.”

  Evie’s anger boiled over then. She twisted around, wishing she could hit her the way she’d hit Oskar. Her father watched her, wide-eyed. She wished she could hit him, too.

  “You can go,” she said to her mother. “You’re not part of this family anymore.”

  Rhona might look surprised if she were capable of feeling anything. Instead, she just stared at Evie, face unmoving.

  “Evelyn!” Papá’s anger didn’t affect her now. They’d been mad at each other all summer, and part of her was glad he was as frustrated in this moment as she was. Of course everything was more intense and dramatic now that Rhona was here. Evie couldn’t, for the life of her, figure out what he’d ever seen in this woman.