Chapter Twelve
The disturbing alarm ringtone on my iPhone blared in my ear at 6:30 a.m.
“Damn it, Ava,” I said.
I shut it off and got dressed. Ava had insisted I do this rainforest hike, and I’d eventually caved. She called her friend Rashidi to sign me up, and he made room for me. Apparently he had quite a waiting list, but would do anything for Ava. How just like everybody else of him.
When I got to the rally point in front of the resort, it took only one glance at Rashidi to understand why he stayed overbooked. He was exotic, with a lean, dark physique. He wore neatly-tied dreadlocks that hung all the way to his waist. Maybe Ava ought to give him a second look. He made Guy seem a trifle effeminate.
Rashidi walked through the tittering mass of mostly female hikers, checking us for appropriate clothing, footwear, sunscreen, bug spray, hats, and hydration. He sent a few women back to their rooms and the hotel gift shop for supplies, and one or two he delicately queried about their constitutions and health.
“The rainforest on St. Marcos one of the most beautiful places in the world, but it rugged, ladies, and it harsh.” His Calypso accent was thick, much thicker than Ava’s, with his “th” sounding like “t” and all the g’s and d’s dropped from the end of his words, but he was understandable. “There may be some of you would enjoy it more with a drivin’ tour.” Me! Would it be wrong to raise my hand? I thought.
“These hills steep. The sun rough. There be centipedes as long as me foot.” Someone laughed. “I not jokin’ you, ladies and gentlemen. You will see beautiful trees, blossoms and vines, but they can reach out with their thorns and stickers and tear your soft skin. They grow thick together, so at times I be using this,” he patted the machete strung across his hip, “to clear a path for us to get through. You ain’t gonna make me sad if you decide this hike not for you. I can only carry one of you out if you get hurt or fall to our tropical heat, so leave now if you gonna be leavin’.”
One portly woman with tightly curled gray hair, who was already sweating profusely and sporting beet-red cheeks, opted out. The rest of us fell in line whispering and shuffle-footing as Rashidi continued his commentary. When he finished, we filed onto the shuttle bus for the ride to the rainforest. As he walked up the center aisle of the shuttle, he stopped at me.
“You Ava’s red-haired Katie?” he asked.
“Guilty,” I said.
He sucked his teeth, a sound I’d heard a few times in the last two days. “Chuptzing,” Ava had called it, when I asked her last night. A derisive noise. Hopefully intended for Ava, not me.
I smiled hopefully, and he grinned and said, “That girl a problem. Welcome, Katie.”
We drove to the west end of the island along oceanside roads and then cut up into the hills. The driver parked the shuttle in front of a restored two-story plantation home that was now a museum. Its whitewashed boards stood in stark contrast to the green of the forest surrounding it. A vegetable garden beside the house gave way to a stand of banana trees, the bunches of fruit bowing them over. Rashidi said they were called babyfingers because the bananas were short and stubby.
The group hike started from the parking lot and we crossed the road to pick up the trail into the forest. The scenery was gorgeous. Even the drive yesterday hadn’t done justice to the beauty I experienced once we started walking. On foot, I could hear the macaws calling to each other. I smelled the cloying perfume of the wild orchids. I saw the bright green iguanas that my eyes hadn’t picked out from my vantage point in the driver’s seat.
We hiked up a steep, winding path, and I wished I owned a pair of hiking boots. The trees were tall, their leaves clustered in a canopy over our heads. The bush on the ground was sparse on the cleared path, but thick up to its edge. As best as I could understand it, “bush” referred to whatever grew near the ground: bushes, ferns with giant leaves, weeds, flowers, small trees, and grasses. Rashidi described it all, and I tried to soak it in. Guinea grass and bright red hibiscus. Ginger Thomas flowers and grape-sized gnip fruits. Elephant ears and royal palms. I concentrated on the challenge of breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth, and keeping my mind clear of he-who-I-was-not-to-pine-for. I swiped a long brown seedpod off the lower limb of a vibrant orange flamboyant. The pod looked like a sword, and I swished it in the air a few times, then felt kind of silly.
The incline winded me, and I scowled at the memories and effects of my recent debauched lifestyle. What the hell was I doing to myself? I had to stop this. The burning in my lungs began to feel good; it burned out the bush in me. Maybe it could clear a path for me to find my way.
We had hiked for nearly two hours when Rashidi gave us a hydration break and announced that we were nearing the turnaround point, which would be a special treat: a modern ruin. As we leaned on smooth kapok trees and sucked on our Lululemon water bottles, Rashidi explained that a bad man, a thief, had built a beautiful mansion in paradise ten years before, named her Annalise, and then left her forsaken and half-complete. No one had ever finished her and the rainforest had moved fast to claim her. Wild horses roamed her halls, colonies of bats filled her eaves, and who knows what lived below her in the depths of her cisterns. We would eat our lunch there, then turn back for the hike down.
When the forest parted to reveal Annalise, we all drew in a breath. She was amazing: tall, austere, and a bit frightening. Our group tensed with anticipation. It was like the first day of the annual Parade of Homes, where people stood in lines for the chance to tour the crème de la crème of Dallas real estate, except way better. We were visiting a mysterious mansion with a romantic history in a tropical rainforest. Ooh là là.
Graceful flamboyant trees, fragrant white-flowered frangipanis, and grand pillars marked the entrance to her gateless drive. On each side of the overgrown road, Rashidi pointed out papaya stalks, soursop, and mahogany trees. The fragrance was pungent, the air drunk with fermenting mangos and ripening guava, all subtly undercut by the aroma of bay leaves. It was a surreal orchard, its orphaned fruit unpicked, the air heavy and still, bees and insects the only thing stirring besides our band of turistas. Overhead, the branches met in the middle of the road and were covered in the trailing pink flowers I’d admired the day before, which Rashidi called pink trumpet vines. The sun shone through the canopy in narrow beams and lit our dim path.
A young woman in historic slave garb was standing on the front steps, peering at us from under the hand that shaded her eyes, her gingham skirt whipping in the breeze. She looked familiar. As we came closer, she turned and walked back inside. I turned to ask Rashidi if we were going to tour the inside of the house, but he was talking to a skeletally thin New Yorker who wanted details on the mileage and elevation gain of our hike for her Garmin.
We climbed up Annalise’s ten uneven front steps and entered through the opening that should have had imposing double doors. We came first into a great room with thirty-five-foot ceilings, and my skin prickled, each hair standing to salute Annalise. We gazed up in wonder at her intricate tongue-in-groove cypress ceiling and mahogany beams, her stone fireplace that was so improbable here in the tropics.
We explored her three stories, room after room unfolding as we discussed what each was to have been. Balcony floors with no railings jutted from two sides of the house. A giant concrete pool behind the house hovered partway out of the ground, like a crash-landed spaceship. How could someone put in so much work, build something so magnificent, create such hope, and leave her to rot?
Gradually, ughs replaced the oohs as we discovered that we had to step over horse manure and bat guano in every room, and an old mattress with God knows what ground into it in the basement. Dead worms by the thousands crunched under our feet. Rashidi called them gungalos. One woman put her hand on a wall and ended up with dung between her fingers and gunked into her ostentatious diamond ring, which, for some inexplicable reason, she’d worn on a rainforest hike. Annalise was not for the faint of heart, and I longed for a broom. What she could have be
en was so clear; what she might still be was staggering. I could see it. I could feel it.
And zing—something hit me hard, just coursed through my head and lungs. A cold, hard, lonely place filled with crap. It was like looking in the mirror. No, it was more than that. It was like someone had whispered it in my ear. It felt personal to me that she was abandoned. Even her name resonated inside me: Annalise. Unbelievably, I had a connection on my iPhone, and I Googled the origin of the name—Hebrew for grace, favor. For some reason, reading those words hurt me. Annalise and I could both use some grace. An overpowering urge to make things right by myself and by this house rose up in me. I didn’t see the irrationality of it; I saw the possibility of mutual redemption. Swept along by a powerful urge, I saved the realtor’s name and number from the faded sign by the door into my contacts. It didn’t hurt to type it in, I told myself.
Rashidi’s voice broke through my reverie. “Ms. Katie, are you comin’ with us? It gets dark up here at night, you know.”
I laughed and started after the group that had left without me noticing, excitement bubbling up in me from the inside and spilling over in that forgotten sound of true joy. I had energy now and a spring in my step. The group was chattering as we hiked out, but I didn’t hear a word. My washing-machine mind was churning again, but instead of Nick, this time it was Annalise spinning through it. It was as if she was calling out to me that we were the same, that we could save each other, and my mind was answering with a cautious maybe, a tentative “we’ll see.” I stopped to look back each time she came into view, farther and farther in the distance.
She was defiantly beautiful and strong, soaring over a sea of green treetops, and behind her, the ocean, which looked like the sky. A view of the world turned upside down. I shivered.
Rashidi dropped back a half-dozen paces from the group and spoke softly to me. “So, you like the house? I see you talkin’ to her spirit.”
Did this man take me for a crazy person? Or had my lips moved? If I was talking to her, and I was not sure that I had been, I wasn’t about to confirm my insanity to a stranger. “Talking to her spirit? What, you mean the spirit of the pooping horse?” I quipped.
“You make like I crazy, but what that make you? You the one hear the house talkin’ to you,” he said matter-of-factly. “What she say?”
Instead of answering him, I asked, “Why do you say she’s got a spirit? What do you mean, like a ghost?”
Rashidi’s speech became more colloquial, his accent thickened, and his eyes sparkled. “Nah, she ain’t got no ghost, she the spirit. She a beautiful woman, abandoned by a man. How does most beautiful women dem act when they scorned? She lonely, and she full of spite.” He grinned. “She lookin’ for a new lover. But most folk too scared of her to take her on. When she don’t like someone, she a mean one. She been known to drop a bad man when he come for no good, hit him with a rock from nowhere, or send centipedes to bite him. When she do like somebody, well, some people say she talk to them. Like she talk to you, Katie.”
This made sense to me in a way I could not explain. It wasn’t as if I was ever going to have to see Rashidi again, so what the heck, I would tell him what I had heard.
“She said we are soul mates.” I turned and smiled straight on at him. “In so many words.”
He didn’t bat an eye. “Yah, I thought so. Annalise talk to me sometimes, but today I feel her vibrations, and she talkin’ to you. Powerful thing. You gonna go back and talk to her again?”
“Ummmm, maybe,” I said.
“Let me know if you need a hand. Good to have someone with you what knows the way aroun’.”
“I might take you up on that.”
He caught up with the group, exhorting them to “Breathe in the scent of the flowers, ladies, glory in the beauty of the forest, because we almost back to civilization, and you may never come this way again.”
But I knew I would.
~~~