by Crystal Chan
We slowed as we neared the edge of the drop-off and then looked in silence at the land spreading out before us. I had never shown someone where Bird jumped. Everyone in Caledonia already knew, and anyway, I’d always come alone. My throat tightened. He’s probably going to make fun of me, I thought with shame. This is what I get for trying to have friends.
I didn’t know what else to say, so I said, “This is where my brother died.”
John winced. “He fell?”
I shook my head. “He jumped.”
“From here?” John looked down the vertical drop, down the millions of years of dolomite and limestone and sandstone, of fossils and things that used to be hidden under the ocean but were now jutting into the air, exposed.
I paused. The sun was hot, spreading thick over the land, the air heavy and humid. “He was five. He thought he could fly,” I said. I wanted to tell him about the duppy that tricked him, but I didn’t think John would believe me. Not yet.
“Wow,” John said. I waited for him to say something about what a stupid brother I had, and how I must be stupid too.
“Poor little guy.” His lips pressed sadly together as he looked down the cliff once more. “And you come here?”
“All the time.”
It was then that John really noticed my stones. He stared at them for a long time, his eyes moving from one stone to the next to the next, so intently that I started to get nervous. “Did you do this?” he asked me finally.
I nodded. To my surprise, he didn’t ask why. Instead, he walked around the perimeter, slowly, until he made a full circle. Then he let out a breath, long and slow. “You really are something else, Jewel,” he said.
I didn’t know quite what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything at all. After a while, John started fiddling with the binoculars that hung around his neck. “You know,” he said, “back home in Virginia, we used to have this tree in my backyard that I climbed every day. I was really good at it,” he added.
I nodded again. Of course he was.
“I had a friend named Nick, and he climbed it a lot too. We did tons of things together.” John’s face shifted. “Two years ago, Nick moved away, but before he left he gave me his biking gloves. Afterward, I found this hole in the trunk and put them there, and I would sit on the nearest branch right next to those gloves.” John dug in the ground with the toe of his shoe. “In a way, it was like he never left.”
At first I didn’t get why he was telling me this; I was showing him my cliff, I wasn’t asking about his friends back home. Then a slow realization dawned on me: John wasn’t laughing. He wasn’t making fun of me. A deep look had settled in his eyes, like he had gone back in time and was watching me lug my stones.
“I like it,” John said, turning around and taking in the boulder, the trees on the horizon, the sky. “No wonder you come out here. I would too.”
I didn’t trust myself to speak. How come my parents, who I’ve known all my life, didn’t understand why I come to this place, but John, who I met just a couple days ago, did? How can trying to make someone understand take more than a lifetime, and someone else less than an instant?
“What’s the circle for?” John asked.
I shrugged, trying to pretend it wasn’t a big deal. “I stand inside it, think about things.”
He peered at me. “Like what?”
I couldn’t hold it in any longer. “There’s something here, can you feel it?”
He paused for a long time, his head cocked, and I was almost crushed under the silence of waiting. Finally, he said, “No. Not really.” But he didn’t look at me. “Do you think it’s a duppy?” he asked tentatively.
“I don’t think so. Most duppies like to trick people, but when I’m worried about something, or upset, I come here and this place calms me down. It listens to me.” I stopped. I was pretty sure I had said too much, and I looked at the ground. It was terrifying that John was getting to know my secrets.
“I like it,” he said again, all respectful.
My eyes bugged out. “Really?”
He grinned. “It might even be better than Event Horizon. But I’m not ever going to say that again.”
I laughed, and it filled up the sky. I couldn’t believe it. He wasn’t shouting that I was a freak. A dam burst within me right then and a deluge of joy poured out, and I wanted to share everything I knew with him. “I climb this boulder too,” I said excitedly. “Want me to show you where I sit?”
John grinned. “Of course.”
He was good at rock climbing, just like he was good at tree climbing. I didn’t have to show him my handholds or anything, and he kept up right behind me. I also knew the best path to take, since I started climbing the boulder when I was ten—that’s when I had grown tall enough to reach the first good handhold, a nice knobby piece that juts out and allows me to stretch for the next one, my toes gripping the rock. Sometimes I pretend I’m a gecko or a superhero, and other times I climb just so I can be close to that boulder, so it can hold me. Now, I know that boulders can’t really hold me—I’m old enough to know things like that—but if you spend a lot of time with a rock or a cliff or a river, you get the sense that it’s not really dead, the way they teach us in school. I mean, my boulder isn’t going to invite me to the movies or anything like that, but it does know I’m there, climbing it. It also knows when I’m upset, and it comforts me. In that way it must have a heart of some sort, even if it’s in a way we don’t understand.
John and I worked our way up to my sitting ledge, digging the tips of our fingers into the broad, rough granite stone. Climbing a granite boulder is a lot different from, say, climbing up limestone rock, which has tons of nooks for your hands and feet. Granite is much rounder, its surface like rough skin, and you have to be really good at climbing in order not to fall. My sitting ledge juts out like a cheekbone, carved out by the wind and rain over thousands of years and overlooks the cliff to one side, the land to the other. The ledge is, though, only about halfway up—the boulder extends nearly twice that height above us. The whole of it must be forty or fifty feet high, and it rounds to a gentle tip at the very top. Frankly, the boulder is bigger than most kids would want to climb, but John wasn’t afraid. He was sweating, though, and I hid a smile. He didn’t think it was easy.
My ledge was small for the both of us, but we squeezed in. Boy, did I wish I had a stash of water and granola bars like at Event Horizon, because wherever the sun wasn’t baking us, the granite beneath us sizzled. John leaned his back against the rock wall as we caught our breath. “I was thinking we’d go to the top,” he said.
I shook my head. “I tried a couple times, but it gets sheer and the handholds are really hard.” I paused. “The view would be great.”
John nodded. “It sure would. We could try it one day, together, if you’d like. But we gotta bring gear out here, especially water.” John grinned as he wiped his forehead with his arm. “It’s crazy hot.”
“I thought you said you could take some light rays from ninety-three million miles away,” I said, kicking his foot.
He stuck his tongue out at me. “I can. I’m just saying it’s hot.”
“Well, you’d be toast if it weren’t for the earth’s geomagnetic field,” I said.
John hesitated. “The geomagnetic field. Right,” he said uncertainly. He looked a little embarrassed. “I’ve heard about it. But not much.”
I grinned. It was my turn to be the teacher. “So the sun gives off a stream of particles called the solar wind,” I said, leaning back against the rock, “and it would eat through our ozone layer and turn us into something like Mars. But the earth’s geomagnetic field deflects those solar winds.”
“Cool. Like a force field.”
“Yup. It also helps us by making compass needles point north, and it helps birds find their way home.” The moment those last words came out, though, my insides went cold. What if Bird needed help finding his way home?
John was peering at the red-tailed ha
wk with his binoculars. “You know, Jewel, you’re really smart.”
“Not really.”
He shifted his gaze to something distant on the horizon. “Shut up. You are. None of my friends back home know anything about the geomagnetic field.”
I didn’t say anything, but boy did that make me feel good.
“If you lean over this way,” John said, swinging his binoculars around, “you can see Event Horizon.”
“Really?”
John gave me his binoculars, and sure enough, there was the grove of trees and Event Horizon poking above the canopy.
“That’s so cool,” I breathed. “We could send each other messages with mirrors, me at the cliff and you at Event Horizon.”
John laughed. “You could just call me.”
“We don’t have cell phones.” My lips twisted up. I hate having to say that.
His eyebrows scrunched together. Then he shrugged. “Sending messages with mirrors is way cooler, anyway.”
We watched the clouds that were pasted in the sky and debated whether they were dragons or turtles or airplanes. After I had persuaded him they were dragons, we got all quiet, watching and thinking. Suddenly John said, “You can have them.”
I gave him a blank look.
“My binoculars.” He lifted them a little. “So you could see whenever I’m at Event Horizon.”
“What would you use to see me?” I asked.
He grinned. “My bionic eyesight.”
I didn’t trust myself to speak. Before today the cliff was my secret, my hidden place where no one could find me; no one could follow me up this granite rock; no one could possibly understand what a circle of stones could mean. The cliff was the only one that really knew what it was like to, well, be me. With everyone else, I guess I had given up trying. And I didn’t realize I’d given up hope until I was thinking all these things with John sitting right here beside me.
I had known better than to wish for the impossible, but somehow I got it anyway.
After we climbed down, I tucked John’s binoculars in the dry little crevice that held my digging stick. “Want to look for arrowheads?” I asked.
“What tribe?”
I shrugged.“No one knows. But arrowheads are everywhere. I find them in my yard a lot. Here too.”
We dug around for arrowheads, and I was glad when John found a really great one. I convinced him to sleep with it under his pillow that night; maybe it would bring good luck. I was also glad because I wanted John to have something in return for his binoculars, and the cliff gave him an arrowhead for me. I won’t forget the look on John’s face when he found it too—we were digging by the base of this tree when he started whooping and hollering, and he even jumped up and down like a kid. It was like he forgot he was going to be an astronaut, he was so excited.
The late-afternoon sun was scraping against our skin like a hot knife when we headed home for dinner. “So if your grandpa thinks there’s a duppy in the house, the rice didn’t work then, huh?” John asked.
“I guess. But he’s been trying really hard to get rid of it.” My shoes scuffed the gravel road. Cicadas churned the air, loud and unseen.
“Looks like duppies are hard to get rid of,” John said. After a while, he laughed. “Maybe the Xolo dog’s taking a nap and isn’t protecting your house right now. Maybe it ate too many tacos.”
I laughed too, even though my skin felt numb. I didn’t think it was that funny.
“I guess Jamaicans aren’t the only ones who believe in duppies and stuff like that,” John said.
“Why don’t you?” I asked.
John sucked on his teeth and didn’t answer for a long time. “If things like that are out there,” he said, his voice low, “they don’t care about me.”
My heart sighed quietly. For all the duppies and banshees and ancestor spirits that crawl the earth, and all the angels and saints that hide in the holes of trees and sit on the tops of our roofs—not one cares about John? How could that be?
“Maybe the right one hasn’t found you yet,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, maybe certain spirits are drawn to certain people. Like friends,” I added, feeling a little unsure of myself. “You can’t be friends with just anyone,” I said. I lowered my eyes. “I think. Anyway, maybe you just need to look for that certain spirit, or angel, or whatever.” I tugged at a lock of my hair. “Dad thinks that when we’re born, God assigns us a guardian angel to watch over us, all the time. Maybe your guardian angel lost you, with you being adopted and all, and is looking for you.
“And besides,” I said, getting excited thinking about it, “the boulder cares about you.”
John snorted. “The boulder?”
“Yeah. It was happy today that we climbed it.”
John was quiet.
I shot him a look. “But trust me, you don’t want a duppy to be looking for you. That’s bad news.”
“Bad news. Right.” He paused. “Either way, it doesn’t make an iota of difference, because soon I’ll be in outer space.”
I winced. I hated the idea that one day he’d be gone forever, so far away that not even a spirit could find him.
I didn’t get the chance to really think about this, though, because as we turned down our long, gravel driveway, Grandpa was outside, standing by the front porch.
Waiting for us.
CHAPTER NINE
JOHN and I were still a good ways from the house, so far that Grandpa looked only a couple inches tall. Even at that distance, though, I could see that his arms were crossed over his worn, white T-shirt.
“For someone who never leaves his room, he really likes to come out and greet me,” John said wryly.
“I’ve never seen him like this,” I said.
John laughed nervously. “You just never see him.”
John was right. And what’s more, I had made it a point not to see Grandpa, even if he was in the dining room, sitting right next to me. Mom and Dad too, unless Grandpa needed something, which he usually didn’t. I heard some people whisper that he was living among us like a ghost, but I didn’t think that was quite right, because ghosts are pretty obvious. Instead, to me, Grandpa was more like a thin layer of dust that covered every inch of our house. You just didn’t notice it after a while.
That is, until recently.
I swallowed hard. “You sure you want to come for dinner?”
John stared straight ahead, in Grandpa’s direction. “You think I’m going to run away?”
His legs took longer strides.
My heart was hot and sticky and loud in my chest. But as we got closer, the screen door opened and Dad came out. He said something to Grandpa—we were still too far off to hear the words—and then Dad took Grandpa inside the house, pulling on his arm.
Grandpa’s head turned toward us as he went inside. Then the screen door snapped shut. I’d never thought of my house as being small, but right then it sure seemed that way, with Grandpa inside it and all. I wondered how there’d be any room left for us to breathe, much less eat dinner.
“It’s Mom’s night to cook,” I said, trying to force my mind from thinking about Grandpa. “Her food’s okay.”
“Just okay?” John glanced up at an airplane crossing the sky.
“Let’s just say if you see a flattened piece of charcoal on your plate, it might be meat.”
John laughed. “Roger that. So if she serves charcoal, I should accidentally knock my plate to the floor.”
“No. Don’t do that. She’ll just wash it off and give it back to you.” I gave him a look. “Trust me.”
John laughed harder, and before I knew it, I was laughing too. It felt strange to make fun of Mom, but in a good sort of way. I wished I could stay outside and joke around with him forever.
I especially wished that as I opened the front door.
Mom was in the kitchen, with a couple of pots boiling on the stove. A bizarre, sweltering smell filled the kitchen. My stomach twist
ed with embarrassment, and I shot John a See I told you so look. He was grinning at Mom.
“Hey, Rose,” he said. “This smells great.”
“It’s a new recipe,” Mom said. She had changed from her work clothes into shorts and a T-shirt and knotted her hair up on her head. “It’s called Reservation Chicken.”
“Reservation Chicken?” I asked.
“It’s something where you reserve the juices for the sauce,” she replied assuredly.
The chicken on the stove was boiling like it was going to explode any minute. Or maybe lift off into the sky.
“Where’s Dad?” I asked.
“He’s with Grandpa,” Mom replied. Her words were calm. Too calm.
I stiffened.
“When do we eat?” John asked. He eyeballed the chaos of half-chopped food on the counter.
“Soon. Let me take a look at your face,” Mom said, gently lifting John’s chin. Her lips puckered. She got him another bag of ice. “How about you kids set the table?” she asked. Then she handed me five plates.
I sucked in my breath. Five plates. One for each of us.
A table the size of a football field would still be too small.
Mom put the Reservation Chicken and rice on the table with a flourish. “I think this might be one of our new family recipes,” she said. “It was actually really easy.”
I blinked at the chunks of withered, hardened meat. They looked hacksawed to death, the way Mom had tried to debone them, and then ossified on the stove. A thin, depressing gravy oozed over them.
“This is great,” I said, at the same time that John said, “Good thing I’m hungry.”
Mom beamed. She stabbed a chunk and gave one to John and then to me.
Dad’s and Grandpa’s chairs were empty.
Mom glanced at where they were supposed to be, and the smile left her eyes. “So, where did you kids go this afternoon?”
It was strange to hear her say you kids. Jewel and John. She seemed to really enjoy saying that too.