Left at the Mango Tree (34 page)

Emma Patrice’s theory, a farina philosophy of sorts, panned out, she saw, but with a generation’s delay. I was the bold Orlean, the broadened one. Me with my Vilder mole and white complexion. So bold must I have seemed to Emma Patrice, in fact, that she felt an immediate kinship with me, though of course we were not at all related.

Like me, perhaps Emma Patrice was more islander than she admitted, for my presence triggered in her an irresistible urge to indulge
in island gossip, something I typically avoided, provoking as much of it as I did. Imagine my surprise when Emma Patrice knew more about Oh than I, thanks to the give in that fabric of history and lore with which the islanders inveterately cloaked themselves. Apparently, it stretched over oceans and across continents, unfrayed by blizzard or drought. She even knew she had a red-eyed granddaughter.

Emma Patrice had a friend on Oh, a friend with a secret. Henrietta Williams was her name. (You might remember she dropped her sugar apples once, laughing at Raoul.) Secrets on Oh—
kept
secrets—are even harder to come by than those elusive rainbow bills, and their purchasing power far greater. In youth Emma Patrice had had the good fortune to happen upon a secret of Henrietta’s, spotted it like a shiny penny in the sand, she did, and with it years later she bought both information and guaranteed discretion. Henrietta was the only one on Oh to whom Emma Patrice had confided her whereabouts, the only one to be trusted not to reveal them, for Henrietta’s youthful indiscretions had earned interest over the years and that Emma Patrice might splash her secret across the island was a gamble Henrietta couldn’t afford. (I have yet to coax Henrietta’s crime from my grandmother, but I will one day, rest assured. When the wind is right and our hot chocolate, hot enough.)

Well, thanks to this mutually profitable arrangement, from a distance Emma Patrice had followed the developments of her abandoned island home, the magic and the mundane, the gossip and the rumor. She knew that Edda was well looked after, knew that Abigail had honored their blood-sister pledge, knew that Edda had given birth to a baby named Almondine. She knew who fell in love, who fell into money, who fell drunk across the threshold of the seedy port bar. Henrietta’s missives spared no islander and no detail.

Emma Patrice’s only regret, were she forced to admit to one, was that Abigail had never known the truth for sure, never known that Emma Patrice had escaped the island strictures and thrived in the shiny snow, though Emma Patrice was sure Abigail must have guessed it. To tell her outright back then would have been too cruel, to expect her to lie to Edda about her missing mother, too unfair. “Then once Edda was grown,” my grandmother explained, “too much time had gone by.” She was right. Abigail would indeed have considered such a tardy truth an offense.

Emma Patrice and I talked through the night. She told me about everything from Agustín Boe’s death by snakebite to Ms. Lulu Peacock’s activities by night. When the sun finally rose, I had enough defined variables to fill my suitcase and then some, but the mosaic was still incomplete. I still didn’t know
who
I was really, and the wind wanted me home, to find out.

My grandfather Raoul Orlean, on the other hand, had had the good fortune of a well-ordered childhood, his past and his future stretching before and behind him like sharp rainbows spilling from clouds. That’s probably why the story of Stan Kalpi, and the rough and rugged journey on which he embarked, captivated Raoul so, for the sheer contrast they bore, the disorder, when measured against his own predictable and orderly life. In Raoul the tale evoked fear and wonderment. How close Stan Kalpi had come to not knowing who he was! How brave that he should have journeyed so far to find out!

Raoul, uncertain that I would be as lucky and as courageous as Mr. Stan, and (though he would have been loath to admit it)
unwilling to accept unquestioning such pale, red-eyed disorder in his dark-skinned, black-eyed, plain-as-noses-on-faces kind of life, had attempted a similar journey on my behalf. Lineage was a matter of history and pride on Oh; no mingling of roots among family trees could go officially undocumented. As head of the family, Raoul had had to try and see to that. He had worried that one day I would see myself in the mirror and know that I didn’t belong (which is precisely what I did), and that I would ask him where I came from (which I never dared).

When I went back home again, it wasn’t Raoul to whom I finally turned. I arrived at Oh and pulled the bits and pieces of the story from my bag, and I laid them out before Abigail. She must have wondered how I knew as much as I did, but she never asked me about the variables I brought from Switzerland. She only added to my mosaic those misshapen tiles she had fashioned herself. Although she loved Edda enough to take her secret to the grave, Abigail’s love for me, her rescued almond, was even greater. And so she passed her secret on.

If I have two fathers in Gustave and Wilbur, my mothers are three: Claudine, Edda, and Abigail, the one to whom I owe my livelihood. She taught me to paint, having had her bit of training in brushes and colors, and she secured my inheritance after Gustave’s death. That night of the sting he had hidden away his money, removed it all from the bank and instructed Pedro to use it to secure his release from jail, should Gustave have been captured by Raoul. Talker that he is, lonely Pedro, he told Abigail where the money was hidden and she swiftly stole it. Years later she gave it to me, saying only that she had saved it on my behalf. Her painting may be rudimentary, but she knows how to balance accounts.

I have never in turn passed on my secret to Raoul. He remains partial to absolutes, though he seeks them with less rigor these days, and if he thinks that the truth died absolutely with Gustave, then that’s just as well. At least it’s dead and Raoul can relax. No one can know more than he, and he knows all that can be known. Not even Stan Kalpi would pursue a dead end. Raoul has recognized, too, that behind Gustave’s slouch-shouldered legacy there stood a tall man, with broad-shouldered inclinations. For years now I’ve been plain Almondine to Raoul, no more the creature with the red eyes and the skin that isn’t his own. To tell him the tardy truth now would be an offense.

Our common quest is over, mine and Raoul’s. What missing pieces Emma Patrice and Abigail couldn’t supply, I managed to scrounge on my own. It’s amazing what you can find—and find out—if you know where to dig in the sand and how to listen to the leaves. After defining the variables of the polynomial that is me, I went back to Switzerland to put together my mosaic and to care for my grandmother, who isn’t my grandmother at all. But our escapist tendencies keep us strangely bound. When Emma Patrice is gone, I’m not too sure where I’ll go. Back to Oh perhaps, or maybe to a city where the lights outshine the invisible stars. Wherever I end up, the wind and the moon will find me, and will have a hand in what I do.

And every now and again, they will insist that I come back home.

When you leave from Oh, your memories begin to wane, memories of a place—my place—too ephemeral to survive in the
concrete world of indifferent winds and pacified moons. In time you will forget your visit entirely. Your verandah with the dancing curtains and smell of gardenia, the chill of the night’s kiss on your sun-baked shoulders, the chirping frogs, and the mangoes in more varieties than you knew existed. It will seem very far away and you will wonder, were you ever really there at all?

When
I
leave from Oh, the wind is still. The tourists notice the attention I get from the airport staff and wonder who I am. They assume it’s my scar that makes the islanders stare, think them insensitive or rude. That’s not it. I am proof of the magic of Oh and my departure always leaves the islanders torn. Between fear and relief, between the desire that I stay and preserve the island’s gentle balance, and the desire to be rid of me and what most of them think I represent. Do I belong to the seductive moon? they wonder. Am I capable of casting spells?

The truth may well be entirely different from what you’re thinking, or different from what the islanders believe. Maybe it lies somewhere in between. Truths get lost as they age. They wrinkle and whither, grow distorted by the filter of the years and the prisms I carry in my pockets. I can never be sure of them.

I can never be sure of anything. Not the oils on my palette that blend and bleed. Or even my Almondine mosaic, with its chipped and sandy tiles that sometimes come unglued. Like the wind, friends can turn in the space of a breath. Almonds can sprout from mango trees and thrive. Too many pineapples might break your heart, especially when it rains.

And one windy evening, when the moon is right, a long-lost grandmother-who’s-not-really-a-grandmother could knock on your door, and ask to buy a painting.

Acknowledgments

It is impossible to acknowledge all the blessings—the people, the places, the occurrences—that conspired to make this book a book, for they are as many as the pineapples on Oh. They are writing teachers and writer friends, friends who live on islands, and friends who
were
islands when I needed a sunny shore; they are beaches and rum shacks, coffee bars and yoga classes; stellar alignments (I can only presume) and proverbial bullets dodged. They are little towns on tops of hills, and one very real and bounteous mango tree.

For their help and their handholding (book-related and otherwise), they are most definitely Priya Balasubramanian, Patricia Gillett, Marie Lamoureux, Dee LeRoy, Kristin Stasiowski, and Kari Winter; for their heart and their artistry, Andrew Bly (cover design) and Patti Schermerhorn (cover art); and for everything, always, my mother, MaryAnn Siciarz.

I am grateful for all of it; I hope I put the pieces where they were meant to go.

About the Author

Stephanie Siciarz
was born in the US and is a graduate of Georgetown University and The Johns Hopkins University. She is a writer and translator and has worked for high-ranking officials in international, government, and academic institutions in the US and Europe. She currently resides in Ohio, where she is on the faculty at Kent State University.
Left at the Mango Tree
, her first novel, was shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize.