I’m crying. My tears mix with the rainwater, the river water, the spirit water, and it feels good to say it, even though it hurts. When I wipe my eyes, the shining spirit is right in front of me, and I see my dad’s face for one full second—he’s smiling—and then he’s gone. All the lights that made him up scatter out into the sky and disappear. The rain is still falling, but the wind has settled. The water retreats and one by one, the river spirits shuffle past me, each one pausing to nod with respect before it vanishes into the dark waters.
“You went out?” Abuela almost jumps out of her easy chair when I come in. “In this weather?” Then she looks around; the sudden emptiness of the apartment dawns on her. “They’re gone.” The warm smell of arroz con pollo lingers. She sees me dripping wet, my tear- and rain-soaked face.
“I did it,” I say. My first words to another person in two years. Well, a living person anyway. “I told the story of what happened . . .” And before I can say “that night,” Abuela has crossed the apartment in two bounds and wrapped around me.
“Ay, m’ijo,” she coos, stroking my back.
“But I didn’t solve the murder, I don’t know what happened. I just . . . I just said what I saw. And the spirits went back to the river and the flooding stopped.”
“Sometimes, you just have to tell the story,” Abuela says. “And that can change the world. What matters is that you found your voice, Marcos.”
“It was by the river all along,” I say, hugging her back. “Right where I left it.”
COCONUT HEADS
BY RITA WILLIAMS-GARCIA
This is how I know something’s different about my mother. My waste not, want not, save-don’t-spend mother says to me, while we’re all next to the JetBlue check-in line, “It’s not too late. I can still get you a ticket.” She takes a blue booklet from her purse and sings, “I have your passport!”
My father pretends he doesn’t notice a switch’s been made, but I know she’s not my real mom. Real Mom would say, “Buy a last-minute ticket at these prices? Do you think I’m made of money?” Instead, this changeling mom repeats herself and waits for a change of heart. She smiles and begs at the same time, wanting me to board the plane with her. But I don’t care how much she smiles. I’m not getting on a plane to Jamaica with her. Being stuck up in the hills with the “changeling,” treacherous cousins, and goats isn’t my idea of a vacation.
“I’ll stay with Dad,” I tell her. I try to be nice. Respectful. Act like it’s no big deal.
Still, she gives me big, sad eyes and her face morphs into her crying face. “But how could you not come with me? Colin would have had his bags packed at least a week in advance. He couldn’t wait to go back home.”
“There’s still time to call him,” I say, and I know I’m being cruel, but I’m not going. “I’m sure he’ll drop everything to fly to Jamaica.”
“Don’t be silly, Winston. He’s locked into his studies.”
Not likely. My brother just doesn’t want to come home and face Mom. I eavesdrop. I know. One minute she’s proud of him, the next minute she’s yelling at him. Colin’s not studying. He’s hiding. What kind of college guy takes summer classes when he makes dean’s list? My brother knows something’s up with Mom and would rather stay 750 miles away in his dorm room.
“Please, darling.” She’s all sweetness. So sweet I inch closer to Dad. That doesn’t stop her. “Please, please.”
No matter what she says, I turn my head east, then west, and in no time her begging smile flatlines.
Here it comes: the flip.
She stamps both feet. “I can’t believe this. My own son would rather stay here doing scritch-scratch”—she means my comic book drawings—“than spend a lovely vacation with his dear mother and his family, and soak up his roots.” I want to say “half roots,” but now is not the time to remind her that Dad’s from the South, because there’s more foot stamping. “I can’t believe it!” she wails. “I cannot believe what my ears are hearing.” She looks less like a medical doctor entrusted with human lives, and more like a two-year-old.
Who is this woman and where is Dr. Bailey, a.k.a. my mom? I turn away like I don’t know her.
Dad speaks up. “If Winston doesn’t want to fly to Jamaica, he’ll stay home.” He’s extra gentle, probably hoping she won’t go bananas like she did at the frozen yogurt place last night. All I can do on the airport ID check line is stare off like it’s not happening. Dad says, “Go home, dear. See the folks. Send our love.” He pretends he doesn’t see her eyes narrow at him, or the beads of sweat dotting her forehead, neck, and nose. He fans her with his hand, but she slaps it away so hard the whole line must hear the slap, though no one looks at us.
“Stop it!” she hisses.
Dad tilts his head toward her and speaks slowly and firmly. “Calm down, Claudia. Calm it down.”
This only makes things worse. The sweat beads now stream until her face is red and glossy. “Calm nothing! My own son won’t come home with me!” People on line interrupt their travel chatter and turn toward the commotion. I’m aware of the TSA agents in dark uniforms studying us. My mother’s fevered glare dares anyone to say anything to her, and my father keeps his eye on her just in case. I don’t want us to be tonight’s airline news story or for my mad mom to go viral on the internet. I just want her ID checked, her shoes thrown in a plastic bin, while we wave at her from a distance as she and her carry-on go through the scanners. It’s not happening fast enough.
“I don’t see why he won’t come with me,” she steams.
“Winston has plenty to do here,” Dad says, back to his calm self. “I’ll keep him busy.”
We all know this is a lie. Dad just basically leaves me alone, which is fine. I’m not five.
“Don’t let him eat pizza all day long.” She brings it down a notch, but it’s too late. The TSA agents stare us down as we near the head of the line.
“I won’t, dear.”
Dad rolls her carry-on bag and we follow. I stay a little closer to Dad. Now only three people stand ahead of her at the line for ticket and ID inspection, and it looks like they’re all together, so technically, we’re next. Mom sweetens and she and Dad stick out their necks and lips to bird-peck each other. Then she wraps me in a hug, her arms super cold, then kisses my forehead and the top of my bald head, which isn’t really bald, but is close enough that that’s what my dread-headed cousins call it. Bald-headed. Baldie bean. Her lips are kind of warm, almost hot on my head, and I rub the hot, sticky Mom spit away.
“Winston!” She flips from sweetness to shrieking. But she’s up next and I say, “Bye, Mom,” and I’m sort of glad she’s showing the agent her passport.
In the car, Dad says, “It’s hard on her. She looks forward to sharing this trip with you and your brother.”
I shake my head no. “She looks forward to sharing this trip with Colin.”
Colin is the one she really wants with her so they can get deep with the patois and talk cricket matches. Colin was raised in Jamaica and lived with the cousins and Grandma, Grandpa, and uncles and aunts until he was six. Mom and Dad were med students in the States and couldn’t study and take care of a baby, so they brought him to Jamaica to live up in the hills with my grandparents in Brown’s Town while they finished school and residencies. By the time they sent for Colin, I was on the way. My mother loves how Colin is like his cousins, Jamaican through and through. She even calls him her countryman. I’m a different story. Except for the food Mom cooks, and understanding patois when I hear her talking to relatives, I grew up a “Yankee bwai,” like Dad—even though, technically, Dad is Southern.
I call Jamaica “Jamaica,” but Colin calls it home. My first summer in Jamaica, my father had to take off from the hospital, fly to Jamaica, and bring me home. After that, my trips “home” didn’t last longer than one week of being called “baldie bean” and running from the goats. It was one thing to have no choice and have to be dragged to Jamaica. It’s another when you’r
e old enough to make your own toast, get around town, and have a choice. You choose no goats and no cousins.
I’ve already blown summer day camp, so Dad drops me off at the library, where I meet up with Robbie Laszlo, my neighbor and collaborator. We meet in the teen room or at my house because I’m no longer welcome at Robbie’s. It doesn’t matter how many times you say, “It was an accident,” and clearly it was, but Mrs. Laszlo couldn’t stand to look at me, which is unfair. She knows what her grandmother went through to smuggle that lamp out of Budapest. Why keep an irreplaceable treasure in plain sight, where anything could happen to it? It doesn’t matter what I say or do. A thousand “sorry”s can’t fix it.
We take up a whole table with our tablets and sketch pads and get cranking on Pyra, our weekly comic strip. We post it for subscribers only, but neither Robbie nor I code well enough, so our site’s totally hackable. For now we just post it and hope for subscribers.
This week Pyra meets her archnemesis, Ice-X, who threatens to extinguish Pyra’s eternal flame. I draw Ice-X and all other guest villains while Robbie sketches and colors Pyra, who’s really naked until he covers her in flames. We haven’t figured out if Pyra’s good or evil. Just that she throws flames if you piss her off.
“Win,” he says, “you’re stupid.” I don’t bother to look up. “I wish she took me.”
“That’s the problem right there,” I say. He shrugs like he doesn’t know what I mean, but he does. “How many times have you been to Jamaica?”
He answers, “Four. But one doesn’t count because I was a baby.”
“Okay, throw that one out. You flew to Jamaica three times.”
He shrugs again. Each time he went, he’d rush back to show me his tan before it faded.
“And when did you go?” I asked. “What part of the year?”
More shrugging. “Winter. Holidays.”
“Where’d you stay?” This is all setup to make my point. I know where the Laszlos stayed.
We say it in unison. “Sun Splash.”
“Home of the best manmade waterfall,” I add, because Robbie never lets me forget it.
He waits for me to wrap it up. “Yeah. And?”
“If my mom said, we’re escaping the mosquitoes, goats, and the cook-a-brain heat of the hills, and staying at the Sun Splash resort—chlorinated pool, manmade waterfall, game room, scuba, and jerk chicken everywhere you turn, I’d want to go to Jamaica, too. I’d be on that flight with Mom. But that’s not the Jamaica that Mom flies to. No. When we go to Jamaica, we stay at my grandparents’ home in hot, hot July. Not Ocho Rios. Brown’s Town. Up in the hills with the goats, thunder and lightning every afternoon, and dumb cows in the street that stare into you like mind readers. We go to the Jamaica where cars zoom by at one hundred and thirty miles per hour, one-twenty if you’re lucky. See, Robbie, you go to vacation-Jamaica. My mom takes us to the Jamaica where my cousins throw rocks at my ‘baldie bean’ because I don’t have dreadlocks swinging from my head and I talk funny to them.”
I guess I’m being loud, because the summertime library aide heads our way, trying to look older than the tenth grader she is. She puts her hands on her hips and says, “Boys,” half singing, half warning us to lower the volume. We have nowhere else to draw, so we look sorry enough and she walks away.
“Hey,” Robbie whispers. “I don’t know what you’re complaining about. That sounds cool. Adventurous. Like Pirates of the Caribbean. Well, except for the rocks. That must hurt.”
I lean over, turn my head to show him the spot above the top of my ear. “Feel that.” I lean even further.
“That’s your skull, dude.”
“Skull with a bump that’ll never go down.” He gives me the Brown’s Town cow-in-the-street look. “Feel it,” I order without raising my voice. The aide glances our way.
Robbie stretches across the table, places his hand on the spot, and feels around, but shakes his head no.
“I bled for days. Mom still calls it a little accident.”
“Maybe it was.”
“Whose side are you on?”
“I’m not taking sides.”
Of course not. It’s no secret Robbie has a crush on my mom. I almost think he’s drawing Pyra to look like her. It’s time to talk about something else.
Being home with just Dad and me is great. Not that we do anything great. It’s just great. Normal. Yeah. Normal. Dad sees his patients at the eye clinic, Robbie and I work on our epic comic strip showdown, and for dinner Dad and I feast on toast, pizza, franks, and Kung Pao chicken. We Skype with Colin, who not only cut off his dreads, he’s shaved off all his hair and is now truly bald. Dad, Colin, and I crack jokes about his head shine and stuff and it’s just great.
Then surprise! One night short of two weeks, Mom swings open the front door, rolling her luggage inside and bearing gifts, right in the middle of our daily Skype with Colin, who quickly disconnects the video call before she can see his newly shaved head. Mom’s full of happy from her visit with the folks, and happy to be back home, and waits for Dad to go crazy over the bottle of dark Jamaican rum she brought him when Dad doesn’t even like alcohol. At all. She whips out a bright yellow, black, and green cricket shirt she’ll send to Colin, even though he’d left his cricket bat, gloves, and helmet in his room. Not too many cricket teams in Clemson, South Carolina.
Before she gives me whatever’s in that bag for me, she brushes my cheek, but her hand is so hot I jump.
“What’s wrong with you, bwai?” she asks.
“You burned me,” I say. “With your hand.”
“Oh, Win. Don’t be silly.”
I touch my face. Pyra struck! “You did. You practically torched me.”
She rolls her eyes and laughs it off. “Don’t you want to see your gifts from your cousins?”
It’s a trick question. The only answer is “no” because you know your cousins hate you, but of course I can’t say “no.”
“Sure.”
She takes them out of the bag, one by one.
Holy jack-o’-lanterns in July.
They’re coconuts. Carved, war-painted coconuts. Crazy-looking eyes, whittled straw hair, jagged mouths with glow-in-the-dark teeth, and high cheekbones. The one with the most hair has big flat teeth rising out of lips that are either smiling or hungry. The second coconut shows a full set of upper and lower teeth clenched tightly, its lips and carved nose pulled back in a sneer. The third coconut’s mouth is wide open, revealing only three jagged teeth as if it had lost the rest tearing tree bark or animal flesh apart. Their eye pupils are painted the colors of fire; gold for the first, orange for the second, and blazing red for the third coconut head—all pupils swimming in black pools and shuttered by Day-Glo blue-and-pink eyelids. What they must look like in the dark! I don’t even pick them up. The faces are too creepy to fake any thanks. Even worse, I feel the heat of her high beams on me. Her demented smile, waiting for me to make some kind of fuss over the demented coconut heads. Robbie would love her look. It’s the look Pyra gets before she torches something. Someone.
“What’s the matter?” she asks. “Don’t you like them?”
“They’re . . .” I don’t know what to call them that won’t make her flip out.
My father senses the flip is about to happen. He says, “Winston, why don’t you put your gift from your cousins in your room while I get you”—he turns to Mom—“a frozen yogurt.”
She nods to the frozen yogurt bribe.
I don’t want to take the coconut heads, but I do. I take the creepy heads from her still-hot hands and hold them at arm’s length, like they stink, and I run to my room and sit them on my bookshelf.
I look at them.
They look back at me.
They win. I turn their heads around so I won’t have to see those faces.
It’s too late to hide the carton of Kung Pao chicken. Mom dumps it in the trash and goes foraging in the meat freezer for cow’s feet, and before you can say Bob Marley and the Wailers, sh
e’s chopping vegetables with a big cleaver.
Dad and I pass each other a look. Our vacation is over.
At dinner, Mom starts off the way she always does. Pleasant. But pleasant quickly disintegrates. “I expected a little more enthusiasm about your gifts, Winston. Your cousins made those especially for you.”
I give her the Robbie shrug. “What they don’t know won’t hurt them.”
She genuinely looks hurt, so I genuinely feel bad.
“With my own eyes, I see it, I see it.” Uh-oh. Flippity-flop. “I never thought my own flesh and blood would be ashamed of the very people he comes from.” She says “blood” with a small gasp at the end. Blood-ah! It’s dramatic and embarrassing. What if I were to tell her Colin hacked off his dreads and shaved his head?
“Claudia,” my father says.
Emboldened by two weeks of Kung Pao chicken, I speak up. “I’m not ashamed. I just don’t think carved coconuts are gifts.”
“Ungrateful. Disrespectful. Inconsiderate of the trouble your own cousins go through for you. Rude. Plain rude-ah.”
“Would they like it if I carved them a cantaloupe?”
Dad turns his stern voice on and aims it at me. “Winston.”
“You don’t know a gift when you see one,” Mom says, and an image of those creepy coconut faces flashes before me. “Your cousins could have sold the set to wealthy tourists. That would have made a nice few dollars for them.”
“They already did sell them to a wealthy tourist,” my dad says—not that we’re wealthy. We’re not. Dad’s joke is unexpected and we fist-bump.