by Nadia Aguiar
The old Maya would have wanted to know about the signs. She might have even known about them already. So that was where Penny was going to go: to the old Maya.
Penny went into the room she had once shared with her sister. She waited until Seagrape ducked in, then shut the door behind her. Penny slid a chair against it. She didn’t want to get caught.
Furtively, she felt under the dresser’s ledge until she found the tiny key, then jiggled it in the lock of the top drawer of Maya’s old dresser. When Penny was little, she’d loved snooping through Maya’s things. The contents of the locked drawer had been especially irresistible. Sometimes Maya would catch her and then Papi would say that anyone would think a murder was underway, with all the hollering that would break out. Penny liked Simon’s things, too – a compass, books about insects, fossils, a maths kit in a tin, random scientific gadgetry – but they were never intriguing to her the way that her sister’s treasures were.
It had been a long time since Penny had even thought about the drawer, but now, slowly, she opened it.
She inhaled its musty, botanical smell of old cedar and leaves, a whiff of Tamarind that reminded her of long walks through the jungle. She had been to Tamarind twice before. The first time she had been a baby, and Maya and Simon had taken turns carrying her in a sling. She didn’t remember anything from that time, but she’d heard the others’ stories so often that they felt like her own memories. But the second time – that she could recall vividly. She had been five years old. She remembered a lake where houseboats had come together like a jigsaw puzzle on different currents into a village that formed every night and disbanded every morning, and she remembered the strange old woman, Milagros, with bird droppings white as ice on her shoes, who had known many of Tamarind’s oldest secrets. She could still picture Helix’s feuding aunts, the Señoras, whose ferocious quarrel they had witnessed, and she remembered how she had kicked the General’s trunk-like shins when she thought he had been hurting Simon. And she would never forget Helix quietly asking her to take care of Seagrape right before he jumped overboard and swam back to shore as the Pamela Jane headed across the Blue Line towards home. She could almost hear the surprising splash, like the sound of something breaking.
She rummaged gently through objects with secret meanings, cast-offs no longer useful but too precious to throw out – old fishing weights, pressed flowers, an ostrillo feather – until her fingers touched something cool. A tooth. It was smooth, its serrated edges blunted by time. It was attached to a worn leather strap. Helix’s shark’s tooth necklace, the one he had been wearing the first time they had seen him, the day they had landed in Tamarind and gone trekking in circles through the jungle, getting more and more lost until he had dropped down out of a tree – literally – and rescued them. Years later, when he had stayed behind in Tamarind, he had left it in the cabin on the Pamela Jane for Maya. For a very long time, Maya had worn it, even when she went to sleep at night, but eventually she had abandoned it in the drawer.
Penny heard her mother’s voice down the hall and froze, ready to slam the drawer shut, but her mother’s voice grew distant again. She was still in the kitchen with Granny Pearl.
Penny took out the necklace and turned it over in her hand. Seagrape came over and nibbled the leather.
‘Shall I put it on?’ Penny whispered. The parrot didn’t answer, just cocked her head and looked at Penny. Maya had given up her claim to the necklace when she left it here – it belonged just as much to Penny by now. Penny slipped it over her head. The tooth was cool against her throat, as though it had been deep underwater all this time. She felt some strange power, as if she were Helix, a hunter in the shadowy light of the jungle, adept and sure.
But what Penny was looking for was still inside.
Carefully, she reached in and withdrew one of Maya’s old journals from the back. Penny heard footsteps and paused to listen, but no one came down the hall.
The journal’s spine was cracked, its glue melted from the humidity, and it creaked as she opened it. The paper was mustard-yellow with age.
I keep expecting him to show up one day, to just walk through the door, barefoot. It just doesn’t seem real to me that he’s gone and won’t be coming back …
Maya was the one who had pined most openly for Helix (though it was obvious she had thought it was secretly). But Penny had missed him, too. She was little enough that the memories she did have got lost in the shuffle, squashed by the others’ noisier and more powerful ones. Sometimes her family even corrected her. Since she’d been so young when he had left, no one thought she could miss him as much as they did, which wasn’t true. Reading what Maya had written about Helix made him feel close, and had been worth risking her sister’s wrath.
There were letters to him, too, written on pages that had never been torn out. Penny knew they weren’t the type of letters that ever got sent, even if there were an address to send them to.
Dear Helix,
I miss you more each day, not less. It’s been three years since I last saw you, and I would think it would be the other way round, but the more time passes the more I miss you.
Fearful of being discovered, Penny scanned the pages quickly. Maya was not a faithful journal keeper. There were often long lapses between entries. Once, a whole year was skipped. Penny put the book back, shuffled through the books until she found the one she wanted, written seven years ago, when Granny Pearl had last seen the signs. Penny skimmed the pages, waiting for some detail to jog her memory, for something her sister had written to shed light. But if there had been signs then, too, Maya had been oblivious to them. There was nothing here to help Penny.
Seagrape began to grouse under her breath.
‘She left it here, didn’t she?’ said Penny. ‘That means it doesn’t really even belong to her any more. If it was that important she would have taken it with her. Anyway,’ she said, ‘I thought there might be something in here about the signs, but there isn’t, so I’m putting it back now.’
Seagrape did that thing where she gazed at Penny without blinking. When Penny was younger, she had been convinced that Seagrape could talk but simply refused to.
Penny heard the murmur of voices in the kitchen. Her father was home. She sighed, knowing she was about to get in trouble about the tank. Reluctantly she closed the journal and returned it to the drawer.
When Penny reached the kitchen, she realized that there would be no lecture about the tank this night. Granny Pearl was in the middle of one of her episodes. She was sitting at the kitchen table, muttering under her breath, kneading her knuckles. Penny couldn’t make out what she was saying, but there was an undercurrent of urgency in her tone. Penny’s parents sat across from her, looking distressed. Evening had fallen and it had begun raining. The wind was blowing the rain around and everything solid in the garden had merged into a single silhouette. The smell of wet earth crept in under the door. Penny stood in the doorway for a second, then tiptoed in and joined them.
Seagrape flew in behind Penny and landed on the back of a chair. Granny Pearl’s gaze drifted to the bird.
‘There you are,’ she said. ‘Is Helix here? Is he with you?’
‘Helix?’ said Mami calmly. ‘Pearl, Helix isn’t here. He hasn’t been in a long time.’
Penny was frightened. Helix was in Tamarind. The Blue Line had sealed behind them years ago – surely Granny Pearl remembered that. She looked down at her grandmother’s hands. They worked restlessly. Her knuckles were like burls, her skin thin and papery, a faint blueish cast in the hollows between bones. These strange spells had happened several times now. Scared, Penny had let her parents do the talking, but this time she felt desperate to do something to make her grandmother return to normal right away.
‘Granny Pearl,’ she said cautiously.
‘Maya?’ asked Granny Pearl, looking right at Penny with a glazed, faraway look. ‘I thought that perhaps you’d be there, too, but Penny has to do this on her own.’
Penny felt like the wind ha
d been knocked out of her. It took a few seconds before she could get her breath back.
‘It’s me, Granny Pearl,’ she said in a small voice.
But Granny Pearl had slipped into the past, where Maya and Helix still were, and the world she was seeing was invisible to other people.
A sudden wind funnelled up from the sea, through the garden, and howled through the few inches of open window over the kitchen sink, spraying droplets of rain across the counter and floor. Seagrape squawked and flapped her wings.
Mami got up and closed the window, shutting out the menace in the evening and closing the family in together.
The sound of the window broke the spell. Granny Pearl was fully with them again. She blinked a few times and looked around, as if she had just realized where she was. ‘I’m going to bed,’ she said abruptly, and stood up from the table. ‘No, stop fussing, I don’t need help.’
But Penny’s mother went with her. Penny stood up to go, too, but her father told her to sit down. They waited in unhappy silence.
‘Take your goggles off at the table,’ he said at last.
Penny had forgotten that they were still on her forehead. She didn’t take them off, but pushed them up higher. Her hair still had a whiff of the aquarium water. She picked up her fork, but the sight of the food on her plate turned her stomach. Granny Pearl had looked straight at her and not known who she was. Nothing like that had ever happened before, and the awful moment replayed over and over in Penny’s mind.
Mami came back into the room. ‘She’s in bed,’ she said, joining them at the table. ‘She’ll be better after some sleep.’
Her parents began to eat, but Penny had lost her appetite. She sneaked a glance at them. Recently Papi had shaved the snowy white beard he’d had most of Penny’s life, revealing a face that was gaunt and surprisingly foreign to her. Her mother’s nails were short, her hair briskly brushed. She always looked like she got ready in a hurry, which she did. Their faces were lined from years of living on the boat, but tonight they looked older and wearier than usual. Suddenly Penny had an overwhelming urge to talk to them, to confide Granny Pearl’s secret, even though she knew what they would say.
‘It’s because of the signs,’ she said at last, taking a bite at the same time so her voice was deliberately muffled. She took a deep breath. ‘I think they make her really tired. She’ll be herself again once they’re over.’
‘What signs?’ asked Mami, only half-listening.
‘Things have been happening,’ said Penny. ‘In the garden, in the water. Granny Pearl says it’s like signs that happen before a storm – you know, like spiders building their webs lower, that kind of thing. She says they mean that something big is about to happen.’
Mami stopped eating and listened.
‘What’s about to happen?’ asked Papi.
‘I don’t know,’ said Penny truthfully. ‘Granny Pearl won’t tell me yet. But even Seagrape’s quills are changing colour.’
‘Seagrape’s quills?’ asked her mother, frowning and looking over at Seagrape, perched on the top rung of Granny Pearl’s empty chair.
‘They’ve started to shimmer,’ said Penny. ‘See?’
‘Not really,’ said her mother.
‘You need to be in the right light,’ said Penny. ‘But it’s true.’
Penny’s mother looked at her father. ‘What else?’
Penny knew they didn’t believe her – she had known that they wouldn’t. But now she was determined to convince them.
‘Lots of things,’ she said. ‘We found a bunch of harbour conchs lined up in a circle on the sand at the cove. That was the first thing. A wild cockatoo was sitting on the roof one day – he stayed there for an hour before he flew off. The leaves on the orange trees are turning silver –’
‘I don’t see that the orange trees are a different colour,’ said Mami, looking out of the window.
‘It’s raining,’ said Penny. ‘You can’t see properly. I saw them, though – Granny Pearl showed me. And she says there’s a cloud that forms right over the mouth of the cove every day at lunchtime. And today there were more pampas seed pods than ever before –’
‘Penny, stop,’ said her father, interrupting her. ‘Any clouds out there are just clouds. The seed pods are no different than any other year. And it’s probably a fungus that citrus trees get. I’ll take a look at them tomorrow.’
‘There are other things,’ said Penny desperately. ‘Seagrape, show them your quills.’ But Seagrape wouldn’t let Penny lift her wing.
‘Sweetheart, all of these things have explanations,’ said Mami.
‘Are you saying that Granny Pearl is making all this up?’ said Penny indignantly. ‘If she says it’s real, it’s real!’
‘Lower your voice,’ said her father sharply.
Penny stared miserably down at the food that had grown cold. Why wouldn’t they listen?
Her mother put her hand on her father’s and spoke calmly to Penny.
‘Everyone’s upset,’ she said. ‘Penny, Granny Pearl is very old now. Her mind is wandering. She’s mixing things up – things from the past, imaginary things. Sometimes she believes things that aren’t real.’
Penny shook her head. ‘Maybe that happens to some people when they get old, but not Granny Pearl,’ she said. ‘I spend more time with her than anyone. If something were wrong I’d know. She made it all the way down to the cove today. She hasn’t done that in ages. It means that she’s getting stronger again. She’ll be like her old self as soon as the signs stop and whatever is going to happen happens.’
‘Penny, nothing’s about to happen,’ said Papi. Suddenly he no longer looked angry; he was just sad.
‘You don’t know that,’ said Penny. ‘I’m surprised you haven’t noticed any of the signs yourself. I thought scientists were supposed to be observant.’
‘We all love Granny Pearl,’ said Mami gently, moving to touch Penny’s shoulder, but Penny shrugged her off.
‘Then believe her!’ said Penny, glaring at her mother.
‘Penny,’ said her mother. ‘We think that what’s going on with Granny Pearl is serious enough that we asked Maya and Simon to come home to see her. We didn’t want to leave it any longer. Do you understand?’
It felt like a lump of food had stuck in Penny’s throat, except that she had barely touched anything on her plate.
‘Nobody told me that’s why they’re coming,’ she mumbled.
‘I didn’t think we had to,’ said her mother. ‘You already know that Granny Pearl hasn’t been herself lately … that she’s been spending more time in her own world.’
‘What’s happening – what’s really happening here – is something we can’t stop,’ said her father.
None of them had ever talked about what was happening with Granny Pearl so openly before, and doing so was making it all horribly real.
‘But,’ said Penny. ‘But she’s still OK. She’s still Granny Pearl.’
She looked at her parents. They looked sadly back at her.
‘Of course she’s still Granny Pearl,’ said her mother softly. ‘But …’ She trailed off.
Penny couldn’t sit there any longer. She needed air. She stood up from the table quickly, the legs of her chair scraping noisily across the floor.
‘You’ll see,’ she said. ‘Granny Pearl is fine – she’s FINE. The signs mean something is going to happen – when it does you’ll wish you had believed her!’
She stumbled down the dark hallway. She stopped outside Granny Pearl’s room and pressed her forehead to the wall. She felt sick and dizzy. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. The silver orange trees. Seagrape’s quills. The conch shells and the cloud and everything else. It was all real. She had seen all these things with her own eyes.
The only person who could reassure Penny now was her grandmother. Penny badly needed to hear her voice, to have her say something that would erase everything her parents had just said. Penny listened, but it was quiet behind Granny P
earl’s closed door. She must already be asleep. Penny waited there another moment, then continued unhappily down the hall.
In her room, the shutters were still open and pale moonlight spilled in through the window, lighting the windward side of the furniture and casting outsized shadows from the lees. Penny was about to step through the doorway when a shadow moved and a figure stood up in the moonlight.
‘Granny Pearl,’ said Penny when she had got over her fright. ‘What are you doing?’
‘It’s time,’ said Granny Pearl, getting creakily to her feet from the chair by the window. In the moonlight her hair was lit as white as surf. ‘I told you I’d let you know when I was sure. Come on, Penny, hurry – you have to catch the tide.’
‘The tide?’ said Penny. ‘What do you mean?’
Penny noticed her backpack on the ground beneath the window, a life jacket sitting on top of it. Seagrape perched on the open sill.
‘The signs,’ said Granny Pearl. ‘I saw them seven years ago, too, right before the four of you left for Tamarind. I thought that maybe the others would be with you, but now I can see you have to do this on your own.’
For the first time, Penny felt angry at her grandmother.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said.
Granny Pearl leaned closer, and Penny could see her eyes behind the moonlit lenses of her glasses.
‘You have to go to Tamarind,’ Granny Pearl whispered. ‘There’s something there you need to find, that only you can do.’
Penny’s heart began to pound. There was a low buzzing sound in her ears. She looked at her grandmother in disbelief.
‘To Tamarind?’ she asked.
‘Shhh, whisper,’ said Granny Pearl. She had been holding Penny’s raincoat, which now she pushed into Penny’s hands. ‘Yes, Tamarind.’
‘B-but …’ stammered Penny. ‘It’s impossible – the Blue Line is sealed, we closed it when we left the last time. It goes all the way round the island. There’s no way back …’
‘There’s a way,’ said Granny Pearl. ‘Take the rowing-boat. Row out of the cove, out past the anvil rock, out to the far boilers. Find the big brain coral, you know where it is, the biggest one, that leads to the crooked cut between the reefs. Wait there. I’ve packed everything you’ll need in your backpack.’