That’s when I noticed an odd shadow rising behind them like a Russian submarine. I put my hand to my forehead like a visor and squinted. Mina mirrored my change in expression, then turned in the water to look.
The shadow wasn’t an illusion, it was a tidal wave. Not a tsunami—not an underwater wave that lifts the general level of the water. No, it was a wave like the cover of Surfer Magazine, a curling, rock-solid wall of water like the open jaws of Jonah’s whale.
I jumped up and ran toward them as all five were dragged into the mouth of the wave. I was my current age again, pounding the sand with my feet, wearing my gold bikini that glinted in the sun. But as I ran, the distance between us increased. Sand flowed up from a trench between beach and sea, a widening no-man’s-land. I watched helplessly, running and panting but losing ground, as they rose up the wall of the wave, screaming and clawing at the water like a brood of drowning monkeys. They were calling my name.
No!
I woke up in the stuffy room, my heart again attempting jailbreak from my ribs.
I pressed my hands together; they were hot and clammy. Suddenly I was hot all over. Too hot. I whipped the sheets off my body. There was not a breath of cool air to be had in the dank room. I had the distinct impression I was drowning.
Then I started thinking about Jesse’s story. Life was insane. It was a miracle any of us survived. Danger and evil around every corner. I frowned, my mind flitting from one human depravity to another. Newspaper headlines of greed, adultery and murder flashed. I was gripped by panic—was Remy a Cesar Guerra? Was he cheating on me right now? Why did he think it was fine to have a month apart? God, I was so stupid. It bought him one last hurrah before settling down. He was off screwing every twenty two-year-old tottering by on stilettos.
I fumbled for my phone in the dark. It was late afternoon in Paris. Should I call him? I’d told him my phone wouldn’t work in Tela, so that he wouldn’t worry when I didn’t answer his calls. But now I realized I hadn’t wanted him to call me or expect to hear from me.
I looked at the phone. One measly bar of reception. Good, so it wasn’t a total lie.
What would Remy say if I called him right now? If I told him about Isabel’s father, voiced my concerns, or described the terror of the tidal wave? I tried to imagine. I pictured his creased brow as he wedged the phone between his ear and shoulder, nodding while he filed paperwork and typed an email and motioned to his assistant to bring him a cappuccino.
I frowned. That wasn’t giving him the benefit of the doubt. Remy had done lots of sweet things for me, hadn’t he? He was actually very supportive. That made me laugh. Who was I defending him to? Myself?
Snuggling back onto my pillow, I remembered the time Remy had brought home lavender lilies—my favorite. I’d had a bad night, hadn’t slept more than a couple thirty-minute stretches. So far, I couldn’t find a single job teaching English, my standby job when traveling. I was sleeping at Remy’s house every night and was feeling very unselfsufficient. Maybe some women liked to drop the reins and ride in a pretty carriage, but to me it felt more like a paddy wagon.
Remy came home early from set and found me on the balcony with Mina’s journal. He had the lilies in one hand and champagne in the other. I smiled at the lilies and frowned at the bubbly. I said something like, “Not everything can be fixed with booze, baby.” He’d kissed my forehead and positioned himself to open the bottle. “We’re celebrating, ma chérie.” He got me a job as a set photographer. He was so pleased with himself, I didn’t remind him that I wasn’t a commercial photographer per se, I incorporated photography into my fine art. But it was money. And art, unfortunately, feeds on currency as much as on the soul.
We drank that bottle of champagne and then another and made love the rest of the afternoon, giggling and running around the house in our underwear.
I smiled to myself in the musty dark room, and noticed I could make out shapes around the edges. The sun was starting to rise. Seized by an idea, I spun around and whispered to Isabel.
“Isabel.Wakey-wakey.”
Twelve minutes later, we were on a blanket on the sand in our pj’s. There’s no better medicine for night demons and tough decisions than a sunrise. I sported a wide smile, Isabel a resentful pout. It was easy to see who the morning person was.
We sat and watched the performance. The sun peeked at us from just above the horizon, dribbling candy-hued light across the water. I was struck by the sun’s benevolence—reaching all that distance to caress my face. I lifted my chin and dug my toes into the sand, weighing the opposite sensations of warmth and coolness. Suddenly I found myself daydreaming about a beach wedding. Life with Remy in Paris had been one big party, filled with extravagant dinners and beautiful people. Imagine what the wedding would be like! I giggled in pleasure at the electricity raising fine hairs on my arms.
My faith in goodness and beauty was restored; my natural tendency toward awe renewed.
“Isn’t it miraculous, Belly?”
Isabel gave a somewhat rude sniff of a blocked nostril. She wasn’t exactly moved by the miracle of nature at the moment. Isabel never suffered from nightmares. Any inner torment happened after her first cup of coffee, so mornings posed only the baby demons of sleepiness and sulkiness to overcome. This was a blessing considering what waited at the edge of her mind.
Isabel couldn’t help but notice, however, that the sky was bathed in baby-blues and tulip-pink. She had to admit that it was pretty. She smiled, awakening finally from the realm of slumber.
But the more she awoke, the more she reunited with pieces of her mother’s story. The more she remembered, the more shocked she became. She was appalled by the horrors her mother had revealed, but also by the love. Long-held images of Jesse Brighton were being torn down, and new ones hastily pasted up. Her history, in the course of a day, had been completely revised. She had no idea how or where to start applying the new information.
“So, you been thinking about getting another job? You gonna stay in D.C.? How do you feel about, oh, I don’t know…Paris?” I kept my eyes on the ocean.
Isabel turned to me in amazement, then shook her head with a smile. “You’re crazy. Two sandwiches short of a picnic, my mom would say.”
I had started to make my case when I was interrupted by a cascade of giggles and stampeding feet.
A pack of eight little girls made a mad dash for the sea in their underpants. Dumbfounded, we watched the girls run past us without so much as a glance, grab one anothers’ hands and splash into the waves like baby sea turtles, new to life and without any trace of fear.
They popped up to the surface one after another like corks in a creek, sending a chorus of cachinnation along the morning breeze. Their braids stuck out like crowns above their heads. The Garifuna princesses heralded the official start of day.
“Well, what are we waiting for? When in Rome—” I said, and jumped up.
Isabel grinned. She popped up, too, and put out her hand. Pajamas flapping in the wind, we sprinted and dove into the waves. When we surfaced, the water princesses circled around us, chattering exuberantly. We couldn’t understand a word, so Isabel and I just babbled back in English. No one seemed particularly concerned at the lack of common language. The sentiment was understood by all. Life is grand and full of promise. And it is fun, fun, fun while it lasts.
After plenty of splashing and laughing, I went inside to get my camera, triggering a massive photoshoot on the sands of Tela. The little girls posed, cartwheeled, and presented proud handfuls of sand dollars. After every click they would huddle around my camera and collapse in delight upon seeing themselves on the digital display. I clicked away, feeling joyous and full of light. I didn’t have the answer of what to do with the rest of my life. But I knew we’d been sent this little fleet of angels to remind us that life is nothing more than the sum of moments, and perfect moments are not to be ignored.
After a while, the mothers stepped out of the shadows to collect their AWOL princesses. T
hey were startled by our presence, but laughed at our crusty pajamas and the girls swarming around us. When the girls had gone, Isabel and I turned to look at each other.
That was always the thing about the four of us girls. We were all so different. But we’d shared every secret, every worry, hope and dream since we were five. Which meant that in any situation I had a pretty good idea what any one of them must be thinking.
I knew what Isabel thought about Jesse’s story. I knew what she thought about me marrying Remy. And I thought she was wrong about both. But I understood why she thought what she did. I could see her lifetime of happy moments and tribulations spread out behind us, running right alongside mine.
I took her hand and we headed back to the house to change into something besides salty pj’s.
CHAPTER
25
BY THE TIME WE SHOWERED AND CHANGED, there was a field trip underway. Lynette stuffed us full of scrambled eggs while she filled us in on the plan. They wanted to check out the Garifuna village far down the beach. I was thrilled. Photographing the girls on the beach had given me the exact same idea.
Everybody squished into the Honda in a good mood. I sat on Isabel’s lap and battled carsickness as Arshan steered us along the bumpy dirt roads.
Away from the shoreline, the roads were lined with humble concrete houses in various states of completion and upkeep. Chickens and goats wandered around as usual, but now we saw barefoot children piled atop rusty bicycles three at a time. Some houses served as makeshift grocery stores and others as impromptu beauty salons, no signs or advertising required.
Arshan pulled up to a drink stand. I got out to buy cold sodas. Kids stopped in their tracks to stare at us. A teenager fell off his bike rubbernecking. The woman selling the drinks looked at me blankly, then looked past me at the car. She called another woman from the back, apparently just to alert her to the large group of albino aliens plopped down in their midst. They both pointed and laughed, seemingly unaware that I was human and could, hellooo, hear them.
A little girl ran up and poked me in the arm, then sprinted away cackling back to her pals, who cheered her bravery. I was used to being the only coconut-milk-colored redhead when I traveled, so I had been dare tagged before. I smiled and waved at the proud child, causing a relapse of tittering.
Armed with semicold drinks in the searing heat, we headed off down the dusty road, carefully avoiding chickens and startled cyclists.
“Okay, supposedly we cross this bridge into a more traditional Garifuna village,” I said as the houses started to thin out.
The “bridge” turned out to be a narrow sandy path with ocean on one side and a lagoon on the other. But sure enough, as soon as we crossed over, there were no more concrete houses, only round thatched huts surrounded by vegetable patches, spaced evenly along the edge of the beach.
“Wow,” Lynette and Jesse said in unison.
“Prime beachfront property, would you look at that?” Cornell exclaimed. “Honey, think I could pass for Garifuna?”
“Not with me as your wife, sweetie.”
“And why not?” Jesse said to Lynette. “I think any woman would do well for herself to hitch up with one of these fine homeowners.” She motioned at a shirtless man, built like Michelangelo’s David, hoeing his garden.
“Jesse,” I said, laughing, “you live by yourself in a four-bedroom house. You telling me you would move into a stick hut no bigger than your bathroom?”
“No, baby, I’d build me a castle,” Jesse said. “In fact, what’s the deal, why hasn’t mansion building caught on out here?”
“Well, as I understand it,” I answered carefully, “the land belongs to those who can prove they’ve lived on it over a certain number of years, so that it remains in the hands of Garifuna. Though I’m sure there are rich evildoers trying to finagle a piece.”
“Like the place we’re staying at?” Isabel asked pointedly.
“Maybe.” I hadn’t thought of that.
“I wonder how many of them sell the land for profit,” Arshan mused.
“I don’t think they’re allowed.” I was trying to remember what I’d read. “Anyway, so far the Garifuna have held to tradition by choice and self-imposed isolation.” I looked out at the fields, at clotheslines strung with Levi’s. “I would assume, however, things are changing.”
A pickup passed by with eight people sitting along the edge of the truck bed. It didn’t look like a family, more like public transport. They passed close enough to touch.
“What an adventure,” Jesse said with delight.
“You know what I wonder?” Arshan said as the car turned away from the beach. “If they knew everything about the outside world, whether they would wish they hadn’t known. Is it better not to know? To be content with fishing and vegetable gardens?”
“And a lack of proper health care or education?” Isabel snapped.
“Well, yes, that’s actually what I meant, a place where death is just a part of life and education is for practical application only. I’m asking—would you think that there was something missing if you had no idea what?”
“Basically what you’re saying,” I answered, “is that because these people appear primitive, you assume their conceptual thinking is primitive, that they don’t ponder philosophical matters like purpose and meaning. I think that’s ridiculous, if not downright ignorant. Of course they speculate. It is the asking that has spurred all the technologies of modern day, not the other way around.” I took a quick breath. I had to calm down.
We were coming up on a larger thatched building with wooden stools, sidebars and tables. A sign said Restaurante Nany. “Look.” I pointed. “Maybe we can ask them ourselves. Appears we’re not the first visitors from the outside world.”
A stooped old woman sat out front. Kids in tattered clothes played along the dirt roads. Around back I saw a hut backed up against a river, with a fenced-in rooster. “Come on, guys, we gotta stop.”
Our group of gringos sauntered into Restaurante Nany. A teenage boy approached us. He looked us over with a wrinkled brow, then turned to Cornell and asked him in Spanish what we wanted to drink.
Cornell realized the assumption and laughed. “I only speak French and English, brother. But I’ll have a cerveza. That word I know.”
I started to jump in, but Jesse beat me to it, politely ordering six beers in flawless Spanish.
The boy laughed, like we were the funniest thing he’d seen in a long time. Children from the street came over and settled onto stools around us to watch the entertainment.
I discreetly took out my camera. I walked out to the road to photograph the restaurant. I took pictures of the carefully painted sign, the stools and tables made of sticks, the colorful dresses fluttering on a clothesline just outside the door. Through my lens, I watched Jesse tell a story that got everybody laughing. Except Cornell. I took the camera away from my eye. Cornell was sitting back in his chair, studying his surroundings. He had a look of almost sadness. Or wonder, maybe?
I looked around, too. It was pretty amazing, this city of huts. The houses were constructed entirely of upright rows of branches stuck in the ground, held in place by a horizontal branch, and topped with dried palm fronds. You could almost see inside them through the slits. It must be awful when it rained. Everywhere there were clotheslines strung with tattered shorts and T-shirts. Out back were canoes and fishing nets or stick pens of animals.
Restaurante Nany was a coliseum in comparison. I could hear children playing in all directions, on a backdrop of ocean waves, and a distant drumming. The boy came out with two of the children, carrying Port Royal beers. I wondered how they refrigerated them. I suspected they’d been stored in the river. I tucked my camera into its case and walked over to take my beer from a little girl in a tattered pink satin dress. She ran away giggling. The first gulp of carbonation was a little piece of heaven.
I let out a loud “Ahh” and took in a satisfied deep breath. “What a cool place, huh?”
Cornell set down his beer too hard, and foam rushed to the mouth of the bottle. “It’s just incredible to me—” he said, and stopped.
“Honey,” Lynette said in a manner that made me instantly nervous.
But it seemed to embolden him. “It’s just amazing to me the far-reaching effects of the enslavement of the African people,” Cornell said, and snatched back up his beer.
When nobody responded, Cornell acknowledged our silence with a smirk.
“You mean the spread of Africa’s vibrant culture to all parts of the globe?” Jesse asked, knowing damn well that’s not what he meant.
Cornell snorted. “Well, no, Jesse. I meant families being wrenched from their homes, abused and killed, and then discarded in the middle of nowhere. Left to lead impoverished lives far from their history and ancestors.”
Lynette put a hand on Cornell’s forearm. “Baby, I’m not sure that the Garifuna would feel that way. I was thinking how magical and lovely their lives look compared to ours.”
“Yeah!” Jesse agreed, smiling. “I think we may have gotten the short end of the stick.”
“Ah, yes, you mean the noble savage,” Cornell retorted, labeling us all racist imperialists with the raise of an eyebrow. Cornell looked from face to face, the lawyer in him clearly prepared and eager. He turned back to his wife. “You’re right, dear. I mean, how would they know, right? Do you think the Honduran government comes out to inform them of the injustice, happily doling out reparations?”
“They don’t have to,” I explained maybe a little haughtily. “The Garifuna are known for passing on their history through song and storytelling. They are very aware and proud of their heritage. The way they see it, they were never slaves. They were shipwrecked en route to slavery.” Looking at Cornell, I lost a little steam. “They’re not purely African descendants anyway. They intermarried with the Aboriginal islanders of St. Vincent. Their culture never would have existed without the slave trade.”
The Summer We Came to Life Page 12