A Simple Distance (20 page)

Uncle Martin picked up a pad of paper from a pile on his messy desk, cleared a space to write, and told me what I already knew. He pointed his index finger to my face, did not mince words.
This agreement
, he said,
will never see the inside of a courtroom.

I didn’t mention that threat was my only leverage to reel in my two uncles from those choppy waters.

Uncle Martin picked up his fancy fountain pen from England, dipped it in a jar of ink, got in one last jab:
I want you to know, Jean, this is a new low for the Pascals. I cannot believe it has come to this.

I let that one pass, too, without response. But not really. To be honest, I agreed. I just placed fault at different feet in that particular instance.

No one starts out drafting a contract in the hopes of a suit. And everyone knows a family’s laws are stronger than a court’s. But sometimes, maybe, a contract can be a bridge between too many tired voices, hoarse from screaming. At least that was the plan.

It was up to me to set a cooperative tone. I gave Uncle Martin this:
Let’s just be careful not to say anything we shouldn’t.

Fair enough.

He started writing, spoke each word as he completed it.
Right-of-Way: WHEREAS, the Pascal family wishes to preserve access to the burial plot of Dr. and Mrs. William Pascal, and their children, Sophie Pascal-Souza grants the Pascal family members an access road, no wider than twenty feet—

No way
, I stopped him.
Twenty feet is too wide. Ten feet in width is more than enough for a car.

Ten feet, plus one foot on either side for drainage. It will need drainage.
Uncle Martin did know about cutting roads.

Fine. Twelve feet in width
. I was satisfied.

He continued, all business. I’d never seen him so focused
—no wider than twelve feet. To cut from the existing estate access road, to the burial plot—

No
. I could see what he was doing. Always pushing, Uncle Martin. So I demanded,
We need to map out the path as we walked it last night. So it’s clear where to cut.

Oh, I see. I see where you’re going with this … Okay: no wider than twelve feet. To cut from the existing estate access road, to the burial plot, along the following path: cutting in at, and passing between, the two grapefruit trees along the eastern portion of the existing estate access road; continuing to, and proceeding left at, the first coconut tree; proceeding parallel to the existing access road, along its eastern edge—

Leave the croton hedge. And the segos
, I reminded him.

As we reached the bottom of the last page, the end of the right-of-way, we were both completely at ease, hunched over Uncle Martin’s desk: him writing, me watching his every pen stroke, stopping him, backtracking, reworking. The agreement was as rough as the port at Sommerset in the middle of the night. But I wasn’t in San Francisco anymore. And rough worked in Baobique.

We looked at each other, smiled, hoped it would hold.

We still needed my mom’s signature. But I could get that. If I had to reach under her pillow, place that pistol to her head, she’d sign. This was the best deal she’d get. And it was up to me to make it so. I knew what was best for her.

Yet Uncle Martin was still Uncle Martin—he was on the phone with contractors to cut the road even before it had been typed up.

I called my mom for a ride back to Godwyn from the waiting area.

If all went well, we’d bury Granny the next morning. And I’d be on the afternoon flight out.

CHAPTER 30

My mom picked me up from Uncle Martin’s office in her jeep, had waiting: two bottles of water and a brown paper bag with two slices of fresh-baked banana bread, still warm from the old woman in Tete Queue.

I told her,
Uncle Martin will have the agreement typed up for you to sign before the funeral tomorrow. You don’t have to worry anymore about Godwyn … It’s over, Mom.

What about the trees? Did you tell them he couldn’t cut down any of the trees? He’ll cut them, you know; he’ll take out my whole yard if you let him.

Mom. Let go. It’s over. This is as good as it gets. He’s not going to cut any of the trees we talked about last night. Okay? Just accept it. Be happy, for Christ’s sake. For once.

She couldn’t, though. Finally, I saw that. Even though she didn’t say anything more about it, her mind was going ’round and ’round, locked in conflict.

Granny’s passing got my mom Godwyn. And the agreement we all negotiated for the right-of-way to the graves would hopefully quiet the family’s stormy attitude about the whole situation, or at least downgrade it from hurricane level. I know I was needed there for that. I know I helped. But I wished I could untangle my mom’s real troubles, the ones inside her head that take over now and then and knock her flat—with no small help from the people around her.

When she first called to tell me about Uncle George’s death, she’d been distracted by the havoc such a large funeral service would wreak on her small plot of land. She’d wanted to buy torches, lace them between the sego lining her drive for the younger brother who’d passed in her arms. But it slipped her mind.

Before we cleared Port Commons, I asked her,
Maybe we could buy some of those torches and stake them for Granny?

So we did.

* * *

Back at my mom’s, I thought it would be a good idea to check in on Cynthia, to see how she and Linda were doing.

It was so incredibly surreal, sitting at the dining table, looking out at my mom starting to stake torches between the budding palms just in front of the bright orange flowers on the flamboyant tree; calling Cynthia in San Francisco to see how bad Linda’s beating had been.

I dialed the numbers but Cynthia didn’t answer. Their machine picked up with a recording of Sadie. A soft invitation to
please leave a message.

I didn’t, though. I placed my mom’s receiver back in its rest before the end of the beep, certain only that I shouldn’t intrude.

* * *

My mom and I passed the afternoon in her yard, worked with our hands, not our heads, to ready the torches for Granny and the rest of them, come tomorrow morning.

But Granny’s funeral wouldn’t be near the size of Uncle George’s. I reminded her of that, repeatedly.

And in the dirt she loosened.

Did I ever tell you about your father’s chicks?
she asked.

There is a picture of my parents in Illinois at a party. They seem like, in their mid-twenties, babies themselves, but I know by that time they’d already had me, unpictured. My father is sitting on a couch between two women, laughing; my mother in a chair to the side, not. I don’t know how many affairs my father had, how many more sisters or even brothers I might have had, had he not gotten an operation that made it medically impossible.

Chicks?
I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
As in women?

No. Chicks! Chicks! Baby chicks!

Oh God,
I half-laughed.
No, you didn’t.

So she told me.
For months, all we ate was chicken. First I just baked it, or powdered it with white flour and fried it up in a little oil on the stove. But after a while, I started thinking hard: “How can I make this taste like something else?” Let me tell you, we ate sweet chicken, salty chicken, ketchup chicken. You name it, I put it on that chicken. Chicken with orange sauce, mango sauce, coconut.

You still see them selling those chicks at the airport; cardboard crates of them piled in their vans. That’s where your father got the idea for his. He bought a pallet of them straight from Trinidad. He thought he could make a side business, while he taught during the day. Got enough orders in the first few weeks to sell the whole batch when the hens reached maturity. We fed those chicks by hand, you know, with eyedroppers from Grampy’s office: fortified cow’s milk, canned, like we drank ourselves, and farinha. Those birds ate better than most Baobiquens.

But when the time came for him to sell, none of the people who’d placed orders came through. Not a one. It was George, you know. Just to be spiteful. Trading favors in secret to stop the sales; showing his true colors even then: politicking at nineteen. Your father thought he was something else for winning me, Dr. Pascal’s daughter, on nothing but a teacher’s salary. Nothing but a pauper, your father; that’s what he was. George reminded him of that.

* * *

We were sitting in a booth of cracked red pleather, eating breakfast at the back of a Phoenix diner, the first time I realized my father saw the world as one big conspiracy—intentionally picking its victims.

Eggs over-medium with hash browns and lots of ketchup; toast, uneaten.

Before the divorce, my dad was a microbiology professor teaching medical students and earning less, with my mom and me to support, than his students paid for a year’s tuition.

By the time I was in college, he’d gone to medical school himself and become a doctor, grossing multiples of his previous salary, which made him happier, but beyond that hadn’t changed him much at all.

Second semester sophomore year, I needed somewhere to go for winter break. I visited him because he paid for the plane ticket.

He likes to speak loudly in public places, especially if the things he’s saying are things people normally don’t.

He likes to shock.

Over eggs sophomore year, he told me what he thought about AIDS.

The American people don’t know this, but believe me, AIDS is an international government plan to wipe out the faggots … Listen to me—you don’t think I know what I’m talking about?

My father, the benevolent physician, continued,
When I was in microbiology research, I almost worked for the Department of Defense … Biological warfare, Jean. They have scientists working day and night. They tested it in the Caribbean first, the fuckers. Now it’s domestic strategy
. His doctoral thesis had been on blue-green algae. A lay person might have missed the connection.

I finished my eggs with nods and grunts, vowed to start the day as if it were any other.

* * *

My mom finished her story about my dad and his chicks as she stabbed the soft earth with an unlit torch.
After that, your father would stop at nothing to get off this island. Nothing. And he took his turn on me: always needing to remind me he was on top—even if I was a Pascal.

I hazarded a guess at her motives for telling me that story.
So I guess Baobique isn’t for everyone after all. Maybe it’s only for real Pascals.

She looked me straight in the eye.
You may have your father’s name, Jean Souza, but you are my child … And I have the papers to prove it
.

She was right. I am her child. I don’t belong to my father at all. He gave me up without even a hearing; just a signature.

The court papers read very simply:

Upon the stipulation of the natural father, IT IS HEREBY ORDERED: that the permanent care, custody, control, and education of the minor child, Jean Souza, is vested in Sophie Pascal-Souza, the natural mother.

My father stipulated away his legal ties to me the day after I caught him in the kitchen with my mom, broken dishes on the floor and that fist shattering more than he ever could have imagined. Maybe I had chosen sides after all, that night, at the bottom of the back staircase. Maybe he saw my choice right that second, in the look I gave him—his own green eyes staring back at him. Because he sure showed me. The next day leaving us. And giving me to my mom. There was no fight in open court. No hearing. No argument back or forth. Just a single civil agreement.

Stipulations are reserved for matters unworthy of contention, for issues one wishes to leave behind and is therefore willing to concede; in order to move on to more important matters.

Sometimes we say things in a contract that should never be said. Sometimes just the telling of unspeakable words leaves us thinned to pulp—and dried; like the paper they’re written on; turning blood to tissue, over time. Easily torn.

* * *

Even though I waited for Susan’s call all afternoon—pulling the telephone out onto the front porch, stretching the cord a bit more, perhaps, than I should have—she never rang. I knew I could have had her paged at the clinic, but didn’t.

By evening, my mom and I had long finished in the yard and already eaten a light dinner of pasta and avocado pear, the sun gone down. Susan’s Subaru drove up from the road.

From the porch, I could see she looked tired, as if she’d either had a very long day at work, or just received some very bad news. Hard to tell which.

Hello, J,
she opened. Softly.

Hey … I wasn’t sure you were going to stop by tonight … I’m glad you did
. I sat on my hands, so as not to lead with them.
Have you eaten?

No. I’ve been busy all afternoon. And I didn’t want to miss you tonight. So I came straight up from Bato.

Hang on. I’ll get you a plate.
I left her on the porch, ran into the kitchen, asked my mom, clearing dishes next to her window, the one that looks past the cliffs to the ocean, if there was anything left from dinner. She said she’d find something.

I returned to the porch with some tea to tide her over.

Susan asked,
Jean, do you know what I did today?

No. What?
Half hoping she’d tell me she’d stopped seeing Marcus. But I was off, way off.

I delivered a baby, partially breached, in the parking lot of the clinic, because there wasn’t enough space inside. I should have had, at the very least, one assistant. But it was just me and Mrs. Bruce, out there on the tarish, for three and a half hours in the midday sun.

It had been hot—just staking those torches, enough to send my mom and me in every twenty minutes for water.

Wow. What happened? Did everything turn out okay?

She sighed. Patient with her own exasperation.

That’s not the point, J. The point is that Mrs. Bruce gave birth to her second child on gravel this afternoon because we lacked resources for even a simple bed.