Chapter Four
OVER THE NEXT few weeks, Tomas redeemed himself for the eggs. He cleaned and weeded the courtyard, cleared the property behind the chicken shed so that they could have a garden, and started the garden, negotiating with the plantain farmer for the seeds. The seeds sprouted quickly in the tropical heat and the garden grew well. Even Gloria grew to anticipate being able to collect fresh tomatoes and peppers. The first harvest was reaped in a little less than two months-by then, they had a Dutch family staying with them-and they had a bit of a party with the succulent tomatoes and crisp peppers.
Mila tried to help him recover his memory, but he couldn't write down his dreams because he didn't know how to write. Gloria had shrugged when Mila told her about this. "In the poorer parts of the Yucatan, children don't go to school very long," she'd said. Any word-association games they'd tried ended in awkward silences-Tomas either didn't know what she was talking about and was too ashamed to admit it, or the answer he gave was so bizarre Mila couldn't understand how it related to him. His response to "Banana," for example, was "The soul needs only to be pure." Neither of them could understand where this scrap of his past, a disjointed fragment of who he was, came from. There wasn't much time, in any case, to understand him. After he'd fixed up the courtyard, George drafted him to help fix up the other bedrooms, grout the bathrooms, plant trees in front of their door, and reinforce the roof. Tomas was eager to help; and there were days when Mila worried that her parents asked too much of him. One instance, she found him collapsed, asleep on the kitchen floor during after-dinner drinks.
"You're not our slave," she told him on these nights. "If you are too tired, say so."
"You don't understand," he told her one night. He'd been living with them for almost three months now, and it was getting to the end of the tourist season and the beginning of the hurricane one. "This is the only way I can find out who I am."
She blinked, confused. "You're right," she said. "I don't understand."
They were in the kitchen-all of these conversations took place in the kitchen, while her parents were doing their accounting for the day or having drinks with the guests-wiping down the counters, putting away the dried dishes, sweeping the floors. Mila could detect the faintest whiff of ozone over the artificial lemon scent of the cleaner. A storm was coming.
"You have a lifetime of memories," he said. "I have only these..." he counted on his fingers, "seven weeks. If I never recover my memory, then who I am is-this." He waved around him, gesturing to the house, the roof, the courtyard.
"Tomas, you are more than the work you do," Mila protested.
Tomas shook his head. "You are very kind, Mila," he said. "But I know. I am just your-handyman, right? In English? You see more in me because you will be more someday. One day you will leave for the city and university, and you will find a boyfriend, return to the United States and get a good job and never come back. But I am not you. I cannot write, I can barely read. There is nothing for me out there. This is my life now. This is who I am."
"That's not true," Mila said, though she couldn't find fault in his words. "I couldn't-like-" not love, Mila dearest, she thought, frantically, "-you so much if you were only the sum of your work."
"So, we are friends?" Tomas asked, after a moment.
Mila gave him a weary smile. "Why do you think I join you in the kitchen every night?" she asked playfully, tapping him on the arm with her fist.
"Because it's mango season," he said, tossing her a mango he fished from a tray. She gasped in surprise, but managed to catch the perfectly ripe fruit before it splattered on the newly-cleaned floor.
"I don't like them that much," she retorted, tossing it back to him. And just like that, the moment-the window where she could have told him how she truly felt about him, her opportunity to plant a kiss on his lips, her chance to take his hand and hold it-passed and, once again, they were two young people stuck together under one roof, making the best of things.
For the most part, Mila was grateful that these moments passed. As much as she liked joining him in the kitchen at the end of the day, a part of her still held on to the fantasy of getting on a plane and going back to Boston and just resuming her life there. Even after two years, she still wasn't over Boston, or Tre Davis, the guy whom she might have gone out-and fallen in love-with, had her parents not packed up and headed south. He was two years older than she was, and walked with just enough of a swagger to let other guys think that he was one insult away from jumping them and cutting their throats; but he also had a quote from Shakespeare to cover just about any occasion. The first time Mila saw him, she was waiting for friends by the rust-and-fiberglass bleachers of the dilapidated track, and he walked onto the crumbling surface, did two stretches, and lit out. She could still recall how her breath caught in her throat as she watched him fly over the track, the grace with which his long limbs floated over the ground, and the steely determination in his eye as he kept what seemed an impossible pace. Her friends had laughed at her when she asked them who he was. "Don't you know? That's Tre Davis! He's like, only the biggest track star Middlebrook has ever had."
"I'm going to ask him out."
Which she never did. Instead, she went to the track every day after school; and just watched him run for up to half an hour-that was all the time she had, because she needed to get to the pool to do her laps. Sometimes he said "hi," and on those occasions, she'd wave shyly.
"Why are you here?" he asked her, one cold November day.
"I like to watch you run," she said.
"No, I mean, why are you here?" he repeated, grinning.
"I like to watch you run," she said, smiling back.
"You think you can catch me?"
"Haven't I already?" she retorted.
And he blinked in surprise, and then he smiled. That was when she knew: she'd won him over.
They never dated. Her parents spent December making plans to move to Mexico, and in January, they boarded the plane. There simply wasn't enough time to progress from slightly-awkward-friendship to possibly-in-love in a month, especially since he was two years ahead of her. They'd exchanged emails before she left, but they never wrote each other. At first, it had simply been a matter of there not being anything to say. And then, it was just too awkward to break the silence.
As time went by, the silence began to serve a different purpose: it allowed her to imagine that it was still possible to climb on a plane, fly back to Boston, and pick up where they'd left off. For two years, Mila had clung to this dream; to save her sanity, to mitigate her loneliness, to remember that there was a world where things worked and the water was safe to drink and people lived in houses that didn't blow over in a hurricane. But tonight, for the first time, Mila began to seriously consider that maybe her life in Boston was over. She began to think about a life with Tomas. Factually, of course, her life in Boston had ended when she boarded the plane to Mexico. But before Tomas, there had always remained a bit of hope: maybe Tre wouldn't have a girlfriend, maybe she might be able to find a job that miraculously paid well enough for her to get an apartment and a car and eat. Accepting that that part of her life was over was a lot easier now that she had someone to start a new chapter with.
Of course, this was based on the premise that Tomas liked her as well. She was fairly certain that he did. The confessions he'd made to her were not the sort of things Gloria would appreciate hearing, or George would understand. But she couldn't know for sure, because if Tomas trusted her enough to tell her the secret fears of his heart, then that implied that she should trust him with her great secret: her plan to get herself back to the US. And that was something she just couldn't do, because making him her confidant would require him to lie to her parents.
It wasn't hard for her to justify stealing from her parents-a dollar here, five there, padding the exchange rates to cover a ten. To her mind, they'd brought this upon themselves, moving her into the middle of nowhere. At least in Mexico City or some
of the larger cities, she could have gotten a job and made her own money. It didn't feel right, but it did feel justified, a distinction which explained why she could now buy herself a plane ticket back to Boston, if she ever had an excuse to go to Cancun.
But Tomas-what would he think? He wasn't stupid. He'd know that she'd have taken the money from her parents. He would be honor-bound to report her, because even though she'd saved his life, her parents were the ones, after all, that permitted him to live with them.
Mila glanced at the clock. It was two in the morning. The storm had come and gone during her musings, and now the night was quiet. Shit. Well, if she wasn't sleeping now, she wasn't going to sleep tonight. She got out of bed, silently glided out of the cool, air-conditioned cocoon of her room, through the courtyard, and out the door. The beach was empty; and in the sky, the moon was a graceful sliver of light. The sea seemed to glow faintly; and in the distance, the lights of Cancun created a faint glow in the night sky. Being so isolated does have its upside, she grudgingly admitted to herself as she scraped out a little seat for herself in the sand. The stars were never this bright or numerous in Boston. She didn't know any of the constellations other than the Big Dipper, but that didn't mean she couldn't appreciate how beautiful they were.
"Can I join you?"
She startled and nearly fell over backwards. It was Tomas. "Sheesh, you scared me," she said, patting the sand next to her. Tomas sat down, folding his legs against his chest like she'd done.
"I couldn't sleep," she said.
"Me, neither," Tomas said. "I come out here a lot, actually. Sleep doesn't come easily to me. It feels like there's a memory hiding just beneath the surface; one I can only find if I am asleep. But the harder I try to sleep-"
"-the harder it is to fall asleep, " Mila finished.
"And so I come out here," he said. "To lose myself in the stars."
"They are beautiful," Mila agreed. "You can't see them like this in Boston. Too much light."
They sat in silence for a while, staring up at the sky. Mila found herself wishing she knew what Tomas thought of her, just as a meteor went streaking across the sky. She glanced at him, even as she reminded herself that she didn't believe in silly children's tales, and was surprised to find that he was watching her.
"Some people say that when you see a falling star, you make a wish and it comes true," she said.
"I have heard that somewhere."
"Did you wish for anything?"
"I wished for-"
She waited, holding her breath. Could he possibly love- She didn't dare finish the thought. After a moment, though, it became apparent that he wasn't going to finish the sentence. "What did you wish for?" she prompted.
"This," he said, reaching towards her in the dark. His cool fingers brushed her cheek. When she made no move to dislodge his hand, he moved closer, tilting his head for what could only be a kiss.
Even now, she hesitated. The moment grew longer in her mind, as she mentally zipped through all of the scenarios with Tre that she'd made up in these last two years. Was she ready to give up with Tre? Was she really ready to start something new? To give up Boston?
To hell with it, she thought, and leaned in to kiss Tomas.