Islands
Diane Scott Lewis
Copyright 2012 by Diane Parkinson (Diane Scott Lewis)
Ebook ISBN: 978-1476331454
Islands by Diane Scott Lewis
The Cataño ferry skims over the bay. Blue water shimmers in the humid air and I tug my sticky blouse from under my arms. The bastions of Old San Juan rise up, stark and ancient. My mother and grandmother sit huddled together on an undulating deck bench, their glares just as severe.
The ferry glides into dock. People rise and shuffle in a line to disembark through a creaking turnstile. My mom stands before the rotating doors as if afraid to move.
“Come on, Mom. I’ll help you.” I take her arm to guide her. She jerks away from me and smacks me twice with her oversize purse.
Stunned, I back away. We leave the ferry in strained silence. I fight tears and walk beside my grandmother up the winding path into the old city.
“Your mother is having a lot of problems with your brother,” she whispers.
“Why is she angry with me?” I ask, frustration pounding in my head, but my grandmother just shrugs.
We enter a courtyard called Parque de las Palomas, where several pigeons squabble from nests in niches cut in a stone wall. Opposite, over the low city rampart, the bay stretches before us, lapping around El Morro, the Spanish Fort, a grim citadel close by. The breeze carries a lush tropical scent mixed with decay.
My mother stands stiff and indignant, ignoring the beauty of this white colonial town with its narrow, blue-bricked streets and lacy wrought-iron balconies. I try to ask what’s wrong, but she turns a frozen shoulder—always staging her private play where I’m not allowed a speaking part. I feel to suffer the punishment, one should at least understand the crime.
After desultory sight-seeing, we return on the ferry and catch a taxi back to the navy base. Before I moved here, I’d naively pictured myself residing in a hut on a white sandy beach with swaying palm fronds, not in a military compound with square, cinder-block houses all the same—cold conformity in a humid climate.
“The baby is sick again,” my husband says when we walk in.
I pick up my one-week-old son, hearing his little chest rumble with congestion. I press his warm cheek to mine. At the same time, my toddler hugs my knees. I trail my fingers through his golden hair.
My mother mutters something and goes to her guest room. I’m too tired and sad to be angry with her. My grandmother shakes her head.
Mom comes out with her suitcase. “Your grandmother and I are going to St. Thomas.”
“Why? You just got here.” My confusion makes her more self-righteous. “Fine, then go.”
We drop them off at the airport on the way to the hospital. My mother and grandmother had flown to Puerto Rico to help me after the birth of my second child. Mom arrived and left again with baggage she refused to unlock.
In our dilapidated Mustang, we rattle the sixty miles of back roads—through steaming jungle bordered by kiosks advertising pineapples and mangos in every form possible—to the naval hospital.
“Your son has a hole in his heart. But he’s too young for surgery. We’ll have to wait and see,” the pediatrician says.
At home once more, I care for my frail child while my husband works shift-work, back to back night shifts, sleeping days, double-backs, no time for exhausted wives. My hyper toddler fills my days, my wheezing infant cries all night. His clothes cling to his wriggling body, damp from the humidifier that adds to the sultry island air.
“I feel really sad, doctor, so tired.” Afraid, alone, depressed! I tell the OB/GYN on my next checkup.
“You’re young, you’ll be fine,” the unsympathetic Lt. says with a dismissive smirk, one of many; hysterical wives weren’t issued with his seabag.
Who knew that post-partem depression would become a recognized medical condition many years later? I thought I’d lost my mind.
A post card from St. Thomas extols the beauty of that island, and a hint of wishing for forgiveness for my mother’s eccentricities.
I read somewhere that eccentric is just a frivolous word for insanity. It must gallop through my family.
Still not one word on these “problems” with my brother. But my grandmother had whispered something about drugs.
I buzz on the outside of my family, trying to squeeze through like a fly, ramming my head against the screen of my mother’s silence. Four years previously my brother and I had unrolled green mesh like new sod and nailed it to the shutters of my house in Greece to keep out the insects. Those flies managed to burrow their way in, welcoming themselves if unwelcomed by us. I just splatter.
In fitful dreams my brother and I remain children. I roam inside the house I grew up in, still dressed in its hues of orange and avocado. I see my father sipping his spiked orange juice to drown out failures kept secret by my mother.
I climb our backyard tree, not the stump my mother reduced it to because she tired of the apples, but still tall with spreading arms. Branches that grasped toward our tarpaper roof, heavy with green fruit, tart and crisp to bite. My brother scuttling to the top, his high-top keds just out of my reach—a blond, buzz-cut boy with an impish smile.
He climbs to the roof where “tuck and roll” pigeons flutter in cages; below a chicken squawks and kittens frolic among the perfume of gardenias. The orange stucco wall, rough to the touch, doesn’t stop me from floating through, into my past. My mother locked in her room, taking valium “naps,” out of my reach in her shadowed corner.
The house deteriorated as I grew, as did my parents, a job lost, plumbing neglected, a toilet ripped out, holes in plaster to chase leaks, wiring that sprouts from walls like angry worms. My father, once so adept, grown fat, an atoll surrounded by a sea of alcohol.
Growing up, I never thought my family wasn’t normal. We were dysfunctional before the trend.
****
A knock on the front door.
“I have a phone call at the quarterdeck,” my husband says after speaking with someone on the front stoop. In Puerto Rico, it’s too expensive for us to have our own phone.
Seven months have passed since my mother’s visit. My son is better and never needs the surgery. His own body repaired the hole, a miracle.
My husband drives off. The wall air-conditioner whooshes and drones. I pat medicated powder over the back of my oldest son’s heat rash, little bumps on his fair skin.
The mee mees buzz outside. Tiny mosquito-like blood suckers.
My husband returns, his expression strange. “Your mother will call back. She wanted to speak to me first. Your brother has died.”
“What?” All the usual questions bubble up, but most of all disbelief. No one in my family has ever died. Well, my dad’s parents, but they were old when I was born.
It’s April Fools Day, yet I know it isn’t a joke.
“How?” is all I can ask. What a simple, stupid, inadequate word. Of course, it’s a huge mistake.
“He was on drug treatment for heroin. He overdosed.”
“On the treatment? How is that possible?” I want to scream, but I’m still in denial.
“Let’s go to the front gate. She’s calling back.”
In a daze, we pack the boys into the car. The mee mee’s splatter against the windshield. We rattle through the darkening cookie-cutter houses.
Why didn’t she give me the dignity of calling me first? More of my mother’s bizarre behavior. Her voice on the phone is more distant than just the thousands of miles that separate us. “We’ll have him cremated. We don’t want to be tied to a grave.”
She’s indifferent, cold. I knew virtually nothing of my brother’s addiction, thanks to her secret-keeping, and now I must deal with his unexpected death.
I’m furious at her, though al
l I do is cry. She seems to resent my tears.
Her silence is a torment, an insult. I scratch at mee mee bites and want to smash the receiver against the plaster wall.
I slide back into the car. I cuddle my children and mourn my brother and the relationship I’ll never have with my mother. No emotion is allowed in her world. She stews privately on whatever demons she harbors. Am I not entitled to feel bewildered by any of this?
I look to my husband. “If I’d known, I could have said goodbye.”
“I know, I know.” He tries to comfort me.
“They don’t want to be tied to a grave?” My childhood playmate tossed to the wind. When did my parents become this odd couple, apathetic, dull?
As a little girl, I remember Mom as nurturing to me and my brother. Always there for us, active in our school, making Halloween costumes, caramel apples, cookies for Christmas; Brownie leader and Cub Scout den mother. Was this all a façade? What hopes had she once envisioned that were never fulfilled?
I smell the sweet, baby scent of my sons and vow never to become like her.
****
My children are grown and healthy, my marriage thrives.
Fifteen years after my brother’s death my father passed on, cirrhosis. Mother is still the grim citadel beyond my shore, refusing to be close to me or her grandsons, unwilling to give up her secrets, to come down off her stone perch. She insists that she loves us, at a distance, on the surface. Maybe that’s why in dreams I keep haunting the house of my youth, searching for an explanation.
In dreams I still laugh and romp with those I’ve lost, and awaken fuddle-headed, pondering their stumble through pungent leaves, spirits, white powder and disappointment.
Looking back from just as many years, I know we could have handled it better. As I struggle with the rough turns of life, I strive to make my own warm. Her neglect has made me strong, not weak. My children are secure in my love. I’ve come to realize I may never understand my mother’s limitations. I just strain not to be damaged by them.
A friend once told me that a psychiatrist advised her “she would never have the mother she wanted, only the one she had.”
As I pursue my own hopes in the second half of my journey, I try to reconcile myself to this woman on her arctic atoll, and the part of me that is missing because of her rejection.
Long ago, I realized you can’t let your childhood define you if it holds you down. Remember the caramel apples, the warm holidays of my youth, my father’s reading from The Wind in the Willows; Peter and the Wolf on the phonograph. My brother and I laughing at the follies of the adults. Don’t look too close at the edges, where it’s darker, and deeper, in the sea of memory and dreams.
Read about another forbidden island. In 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte is exiled to remote Saint Helena. The Chef’s daughter, Amélie, is determined to rise in importance and entice her emperor with her beautiful singing voice. She is soon drawn into his clash with their British jailers, court intrigues and a burgeoning sexual attraction. Amélie suspects someone in their entourage is poisoning him. Now she must earn his love, uncover the culprit and join in Napoleon’s last great battle plan, a dangerous escape.
“In Elysium, Diane Scott Lewis does a magnificent job of immersing the reader into the setting.” Long and Short Reviews
The first chapter of Elysium (published by Eternal Press) by Diane Scott Lewis
Chapter One
From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step- Napoleon Bonaparte
“Land ho!”
The news she’d waited ten weeks to hear, Amélie Perrault pushed through the red-coated soldiers and squeezed past sailors to reach the rail. The wood slimy in her grip, she chewed on the tip of her thumbnail and stared at a sea so long empty. A dark mass shrouded in mist hovered on the horizon.
HMS Northumberland scudded closer under billowing sails. The mist faded, lifted like a veil by the ship’s prow. More of the French crowded around, jabbing her with elbows as pointed as their words. Whimpers and cries, stale perfume, filled the air.
St. Helena’s perimeters were forbidding, a citadel cloaked in splintered cliffs.
“She’s a volcanic fist, spewed up from the sea.” Amélie rubbed a hand below her bodice to smooth down the churning knot in her stomach. A defiant place to cling to this last drop of ocean, the island was no paradise.
She bit down on her lip. Had she insisted on accompanying her father only to suffer a fate worse than trapped under her brother’s thumb in France?
“Peste, we sailed a thousand leagues for that black wart?” Clarice elbowed a path to the rail. The chambermaid’s daughter swayed her hips with the motion of the ship. “The English are fiends to have forced us to come.”
The smug faces of the nearby English officers proved they were relieved to banish the deposed Emperor of the French and his followers to this desolate spot in the South Atlantic.
“That’s only the outer shell. St. Helena has to be lush farther in. Or how could anyone survive here?” Amélie leaned forward and studied the terrain—soaring basalt peaks that stabbed into a whirl of clouds. She suppressed a shiver.
“We’ll die here,” Clarice snapped. “That’s what our captors want.”
“At least it is land. Fresh fruits and vegetables.” Amélie’s stomach rumbled at the hard biscuits she’d eaten earlier. Bug-riddled tack was all they had left after a storm chased the flotilla away from the African coast. A gust of wind slapped at her salt-crusted hair. She pressed the teak rail and couldn’t allow her resolve to whip away. She’d sought a grand adventure, the chance to be of use to her emperor. “The island is an important port for the East India Company.”
“Did you study this wart in one of your precious books?” Clarice puckered her upper lip between plump cheeks. “You try to act smart, but you look like a little girl. It’s absurd for the head chef’s daughter to be so skinny.”
“And you take too much pleasure in being rude. There’s nothing wrong with me or reading.” Amélie touched her bony hip and glared sidelong at Clarice, someone she’d tried but failed to befriend. Two weeks into the voyage, she decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. “How tragic some women don’t bother to learn anything.”
“My mother says reading is wasted on women.” Clarice put one hand on her hip and tossed back her head, her favorite pose. Her white cap fluttered in the breeze. She brushed her fingers over her cleavage. “Unless I rot here, or the men are blind, I’ll make my way.”
“You would throw yourself at strange men?” Amélie gripped the rail again as the ship rolled. Water sloshed over her feet and she curled her toes in sodden shoes.
“One man is the same as another.”
“They all seem different to me.” Unattainable, never attracted to her, but at the ripe old age of nineteen—the same age as Clarice—Amélie hadn’t cared and nurtured her brain. Like her desires for the island, she’d rely on her interior.
The wind swirled around her and she stuffed unruly tresses her mother once called honey-gold under her straw hat. Her throat tightened at that memory, her mother lost to her too soon, too quickly.
The ship’s officers on deck shouted orders. Sailors scrambled up the rigging of the 74-gun man-of-war and began to trim the sails. The Union Jack snapped above their heads. Amélie closed her eyes for a moment and imagined the tricolor of imperial France. But the enemy flag remained.
“St. Helena looks like the Devil’s last shit before he dropped into Hell.” Saint-Denis, one of the emperor’s valets, pushed up in the crowd behind the two girls. “Oh, sorry, if I’ve offended your delicate ears.” His sooty eyes flashed above his usual smirk.
Amélie smiled at his frank humor. “We’re at the end of the world, with spring now in October. Everything is flipped upside down.” But nothing as it should be might work in her favor. An unusual place for an ill-fitting young woman.
She remembered when the Southern Cross replaced the familiar North Star in the night sky as
they sailed south of the equator. That change both intrigued and troubled her, emphasizing the vast distance of their exile.
Saint-Denis swept back his dark hair as he towered over them. “A dismal plop of lava, but let’s hope we make these English scoundrels regret their error.”
“Where is His Majesty? Isn’t he coming up to see the island?” Amélie scanned the sad faces around her, her breath quicker in anticipation.
“The emperor will never escape from here as he did Elba.” Clarice turned to Saint-Denis, her eyes half-closed. “I’ve wanted to ask you, does His Majesty mind if his valets marry?” She nestled into his side.
Saint-Denis chuckled, but raised his shoulder as if to fence her out. “Our emperor will handle the situation, mes jeune filles. Excuse me, I must go below and attend him.” The valet tipped his hat to the girls before he stepped back and strutted off, his legs like rapiers in white silk stockings. Amélie hid a grin when Clarice bristled cat-like at his indifference to her charms.
“Maybe we won’t have to stay long. France and England might allow us to return to Europe if political situations change.” Amélie sighed, unsure if she wanted that either. The bustle of civilization, back to the ordinary, shuffled aside. In a quick sniff, she inhaled the scent of earth that drifted over the saline sea. “My emperor has faced adversity many times before.” She’d grasp that tenacity for herself.
“Your emperor, is it?” Clarice puckered her lip again, her hazel eyes assessing. “We should worry about our own future. You need to stop drooling over something you’ll never have. Try enticing one of his valets.”
“I’m not—” Amélie’s cheeks burned. She swallowed her anger. She’d devise a way to be important to her sovereign, though not in the manner Clarice insinuated. “A clever woman can have influence that has nothing to do with scandal. Have you no pride?”
“Pride will get you little on the Devil’s last shit.” Clarice wriggled out from the gawping people and sauntered down the deck. Several sailors leered at her buttocks through the clinging sheath of her dress.
Near the main mast Amélie’s father motioned for her to join him. She waved, but ignored the summons. He mustn’t treat as a child. She left the rail, and walked in the opposite direction. The planks heaved like a living thing beneath her and she adjusted her gait.