The Heart Begins Here

by Jacqueline Dumas

  But her sweet angel wriggled away, high-stepped into the water, her damp hair coiling down the nape of her neck. “Catch me if you can.”

  Wanda retreated to the yellow blanket, waved back at Angelica bobbing in the waves.

  Angelica dived under, surfaced, dived again, resurfaced. Waved both arms. Wanda smiled, waved back. The stupidity of it all. The horror.

  Angelica waved a third time.

  And then the sea sucked her in.

  Wanda sat staring at the spot where Angelica had just been. She told herself that any second now Angelica would pop up like a pupazzo a molla and swim back to shore to poke fun like she always did at Wanda’s over-seriousness. But Angelica did not reappear.

  Wanda sat stuck to the blanket, for how long she didn’t know, except that the clouds had rolled in by the time she came to her senses to run for help. She had the presence of mind to pull on a T-shirt over her naked breasts, Angelica’s red one because it was the handiest. She took a shortcut along the rough road that led to the main beach where some young men were kicking a soccer ball around in the sand, and in a mishmash of garbled Italian and Spanish, she managed to convey what had happened.

  After that, everything was hazy. The soccer players had followed her back to the cove. She remembered one of them shaking out the blanket and folding it up, and another offering her a cigarette. She remembered the Guardia Civil arriving, and one officer in particular who was very emotional and cried, and another less kind one, a captain she thought, who shook his head and said they were tontas to be on that beach by themselves, and that it was not the first time a turista had drowned in that particular stretch of water. He pointed down the coast and said that the bodies usually washed up ten kilometres away.

  The kind one told her that it would probably take about three days for her friend’s body to surface. He held up three fingers to make sure she understood. The captain shrugged and said that sometimes the bodies never showed up at all, that sometimes the undercurrents pulled them farther out to sea and they became shark food.

  The kind one said, Not to worry, Señorita, that they would recover her friend’s body. She filled out some forms, providing contact information for Angelica’s family, and he assured her that he would tell her as soon as the body was found.

  She spent the night alone at the beach, howling at the sea.

  WANDA CONFIDED THAT SOMETIMES she still woke in the night to agonize over different scenarios. What could she have done to persuade Angelica not to go in the water that day? What if she had gone in with her? Would Angelica have stayed close to shore, out of danger? Or would Wanda have swam out and been pulled under with her?

  I now understood the yellowed, clipped-out poem from a British magazine that Wanda kept by her bedside. The poem was written by Elizabeth Smart on the death of her youngest daughter, Rose. In the poem, Smart admonishes herself for persisting to exist: “Unstoppable blossom/Above my rotting daughter.” The guilt of the living.

  My own belief is that when our time is up, that’s it: Our time is up. If Angelica had not drowned on that particular day, she would have fallen off a cliff or been hit by a car on the way back from the beach, or maybe she would have dropped dead in a restaurant from an aneurysm.

  As it turned out, it did not take three days for the body to wash up. A fishing boat found it the next day. The kind Guardia went to the pensión to fetch Wanda, so she could identify the body.

  She had witnessed Angelica’s disappearance, but until the moment she saw the body, Wanda had not truly believed that Angelica was dead, not in her heart. She had clung to the hope that Angelica might have grabbed onto a branch or a passing dolphin and been swept to a nearby island and still be alive. It was the act of viewing Angelica’s body that made the death tangible. Yes, the bloated blackened face was that of her lover. She verified the peculiar way the little toe curled in, and the presence of the scar on her sweet angel’s outer left thigh that she liked to trace with her tongue.

  Only later did Wanda consider how difficult it must have been for Angelica to flee in the way that they had, to leave her family, especially her mother. Angelica had written her mother faithfully—five or six long letters from France and Spain that she mailed on the way out of whatever town they were leaving. She had even phoned once, only to have Dante come on the line to forbid her to call again.

  “You’ve already caused your mother enough pain,” he said. “And by the way, don’t bother with any more letters.”

  He had intercepted all of them.

  Wanda had braced herself for the unavoidable call to the Vestinis, all the while hoping it would not be Dante to come to the phone. (The Vestinis had no phone of their own. To reach them you had to call the bar downstairs.) She managed to get through to the bar, but the owner said that poor Angelica’s mother and brothers were not home, that there had been una grava tragedia and that they were en route to Spain. For some reason, it hadn’t occurred to Wanda that the authorities might already have contacted them.

  To her eternal shame, she had packed up, hailed a cab to the airport, and boarded the first available jet to Canada.

  To this day, Wanda reproached herself for leaving in such a cowardly way. Angelica’s mother had shown her nothing but kindness and generosity from the moment she had entered the Vestini home, to the point that Wanda considered she might have fallen in love as much with the warm familial ambiance as with Angelica. But Wanda refused to use immaturity as an excuse for not finding the courage to face Angelica’s mother.

  10.

  BACK IN CANADA, WANDA’S JOB in Winnipeg was waiting. No period to mourn. She rented an apartment and had her stuff sent up from her sister’s garage in Moose Jaw. Every day she went to and from work as if everything was normal. Life went on as if nothing extraordinary had happened.

  The closet was a deep and dark place, and concealing what was most important became second nature, habit-forming. You started out by deflecting questions about the things that mattered most to you from people who mattered the least, and before you knew it, you were lying to the people who mattered most about things that didn’t matter at all. You hid what brought you sorrow because you distrusted the source of the sorrow. You hid what brought you joy so that it wouldn’t be taken from you. You did whatever you could to protect yourself, and the result was injury to yourself and to the people you cared about. The worst was hiding your joys. After a while, you came to believe that you didn’t deserve them.

  Although surrounded by her colleagues, who were also professional caregivers, it did not occur to Wanda to confide in any of them. Had it been her husband who died or her fiancé, it would’ve been different. But her female lover? How to even begin to describe what Angelica had meant to her, the place she had held in her life. In those days, no one came out of the closet at work. It wasn’t safe. If you worked with children, you would lose your job. Even nowadays, some people are squeamish about a teacher or social worker who is lesbian. Yet there she was, her own life in shambles, and she was expected to be helping other people sort out theirs.

  At work, she lent a sympathetic ear to colleagues who were going through divorces and family deaths (for which they received flowers and compassionate leaves). But her own personal life she kept private. She worked long hours, always the one to volunteer at Christmas and other holidays. Her co-workers assumed that after-hours she led a boring empty life.

  Didn’t they know we were taught from childhood to hate our despicable selves? thought Wanda. To be suspicious of the world and everyone in it, especially ourselves?

  Wanda told me she could still be ambushed with longing for Angelica. She would round a corner and suddenly there she was in the crowd: Angelica, the mop of curly black hair, the smooth skin, sometimes even the smell of her.

  Oh, how she missed the salty Mediterranean smell of her! And oh, how it hurt me to hear Wanda say it! How they’d be walking along and Angelica w
ould take hold of her hand and burst into song, no matter where they were or who was around. If she felt like it, Angelica would belt out the latest Italian pop song at the top of her lungs with no trace of self-consciousness. So not Canadian. So not like me.

  Angelica was Wanda’s most protected secret. She had not even told Cindy about her.

  WANDA SAT ALONE ON that other beach in Maui, with her seat pushed back as she observed the sunlight dancing on the glassy ocean surface, belying the danger that lurked below. Meanwhile, I was making my shaky humbled way back to our mat at Little Beach, where I then sat feeling desolate and sorry for myself in my heavy sand-filled bathing suit. My arms had broken out in ugly red spots, and I could almost hear my mother’s voice as I pulled on my T-shirt. “I told you to be careful.”

  After a while, Wanda slid her seat forward, started the car, and drove back to Little Beach.

  It seemed like hours before I saw her stomping back up the beach toward me.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “It’s too fucking hot.”

  She bent to look at me more closely. “Your face is all splotchy,” she said.

  We gathered up our belongings and picked our way over the rocks and back to the car, which was now parked in a different spot. With nothing better to do, we drove to the Iao Valley.

  How many shades of green were possible? I wouldn’t have been surprised to encounter dinosaurs munching on the lush vegetation. We were lured by a trail that promised to lead deep into the jungle, only to be cut short by KEEP OUT signs in aggressive red letters.

  “Maui’s an overpriced Disneyland for overfed Americans,” grumbled Wanda. “It’s a monument to private property littered with NO TRESPASSING signs. Even the accessible beaches are swarming with private companies selling lessons for this and that. You can’t even visit Haleakala—the bloody sacred mountain of Haleakala, for chrissakes—for fear of getting mowed down by a bunch of yokels on rental bikes. Maybe you should close your bookstore and start a business renting out the tides and shifting sands.”

  As if to prove her point, we lunched at an overpriced hamburger joint and fled back to the hotel.

  Once in the room, I flicked on the TV. Every second channel seemed to feature a different evangelist admonishing us about the evils of homosexuality. An exasperated Wanda finally threw a cushion at the current moussed evangelist wagging his finger at us. “What rock did you crawl out from under?” she snarled and stomped out to get a breath of “clean” air.

  She returned smelling of cigarette smoke and looking no less cross than when she had left.

  “Really? You started smoking again?”

  “Save your concern for important issues,” Wanda said.

  “Such as?”

  “The plight of native Hawaiians, for one. I just had a chat with our Pollyanna desk clerk, Rick.”

  “What, now you want a gloomy desk clerk?”

  “I asked him where he’s from, and he said, ‘Here,’ which is ridiculous. Obviously, he’s not from ‘here.’ You only have to listen to that southern accent of his.”

  “Your point being…?”

  “You haven’t noticed? How cagey the non-Hawaiians who live here get when you ask where they’re from? They’re from somewhere else just like you and me. But they don’t want to be a shoe salesman from New Jersey or a steelworker from Detroit. They want to be one of the beautiful people who was born here. It’s like they had no life before coming here.”

  “So, what is your point?”

  “My ‘point’ is that most of these people are play-acting. They’re pretending to be someone they’re not. They’ve fled the previous trite lives they were leading in some dreary Midwest town or other.”

  “And? There’s something wrong with that?”

  “It’s a sham. You can’t leave yourself behind like that.”

  “And you care because…?”

  “Because on a societal level, if you bury your head in the sand and pretend that there are no problems, you’re one of the problems.”

  “And we didn’t come here to leave our troubles behind? Wasn’t this your idea in the first place?”

  “Yes, and I’m ashamed of it. Yesterday I was talking to this cashier at the supermarket, Aikane. Now she is Hawaiian-born, but the rest of her family is in California. She told me that none of them, not her mother or her brothers or her sisters, not her aunts or her uncles, none of them can afford to live here anymore. Aikane’s the only one, and that’s because she married one of the golf pros out at Wailea. Do you get what I’m saying here, Sarie? Her family can’t afford to live on their own fucking island anymore. This, the land of their forebears. And you know why? Because big money controls this island, that’s why. And hardly any of that big money goes back into the community. Property taxes and business taxes are close to nil. Look around you. Billions of tourist dollars are spent here, but there’s no public transportation system. The library’s a joke. The schools are crystal-meth-dealing dens. And police to deal with the drug dealers? There are no police to speak of because they can’t afford to live here either. All those posh golf courses, those movie-star villas, they milk the island. There’s not even a decent recycling program. We’re on this isolated group of islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for chrissakes, and there’s no recycling program. Face it, Sara, every dollar we spend here contributes to the continued exploitation of this beautiful island.”

  “Okay, so what are we supposed to do about it? Keep on having a horrible time? Now that we’re here, can’t we at least try and enjoy ourselves? Anyway, isn’t it possible that the spirit of this island is bigger than the commercialism you’re bitching about?”

  Wanda rolled her eyes. “You’re so naïve, Sara.”

  ON THE MORNING OF our anniversary, Wanda suggested we hike up a mountain to a waterfall known by the locals as the Stream of Honey. She had been talking again to Aikane, who had assured her that we would encounter no KEEP OUT signs, and as a bonus, we would pass through a magnificent bamboo forest.

  We set off up the trail, arriving at the bamboo forest after an hour or so.

  “This is amazing,” said Wanda. “Go on ahead. I’d like to spend some time here taking pictures.”

  “That’s okay, I’ll wait,” I said.

  “Don’t be so clingy. Go on. I’ll catch up.”

  I made my way dejectedly through the snapping cracking bamboo forest, on through a trail of lush vegetation to some berry bushes where, out of habit, I stopped to check my surroundings before reminding myself that there were no bears in Hawaii. I continued up to a fast-moving stream where the path ended abruptly and picked up again on the other side. I could hear the waterfall, but couldn’t see it. I hopped from stone to stone across the stream and followed it against the current, beckoned by the deepening boom of the falls. Around a couple of bends, and there it was before me: A flashing veil of water plunging from hundreds of feet above. I wiped the wet from a flat stone and sat to await Wanda in the mist of the waterfall called the Stream of Honey.

  When Wanda finally arrived, she was elated.

  “Oh, Cindy,” she gushed. “There’s something extraordinary about that bamboo forest, something so ethereal. I only hope I was able to capture some of it with the camera. I shot three rolls of film.”

  “What did you just say?”

  “That I shot…”

  “Not that, Wand. You called me ‘Cindy.’”

  I was shouting because of the waterfall, but I would’ve been shouting anyway.

  Wanda looked away. There was nothing more to say.

  We didn’t speak on the way down and hardly at all the rest of the day. And we had yet to get through our special dinner.

  It pained me to think that what Wanda would probably remember most about our Maui trip would be that it was me with her, and not Cindy.

  11.

  ON
THE WAY TO MAMA’S FISH HOUSE, I drove with the window down and focused on the feel of the wind on my face and the softness of the sea as it turned a dusky pink. I had spent months in anticipation of the occasion and was obstinate to salvage what I could of the evening.

  At Mama’s, an overly friendly maître d’ led us to our reserved table by the window.

  “You two have got to be sisters,” she chirped.

  “No, but we are close,” I said, turning to smile conspiratorially at Wanda.

  Wanda is tall and dark and muscular; I’m short and blonde and thin. We looked nothing alike, but straight people routinely picked up on the intimacy of our relationship without grasping its context.

  But Wanda was staring out into space. It was obvious she hadn’t heard the comment.

  I wished that one day Wanda and Cindy would be asked if they were related. I wished that Wanda with her spiked red hair would get asked if she were Cindy’s mother.

  “I’m sure looking forward to this meal,” I said half-heartedly. “Aren’t you, Wand?”

  “Actually, I’m not all that hungry.”

  The maître d’ pulled out Wanda’s chair. “I’m sure we can find something on the menu to tempt you. I’ll send over your server. His name is Kimmy.”

  “Of course it is,” said Wanda.

  “Oh, you know him?”

  “Just kidding. But listen, I just remembered something. Is there a phone I could use, briefly? I have a calling card.”

  “You bet. Follow me.”

  “Be right back, Sarie.”

  “Another of those really difficult cases to check up on?”

  Why the continued charade?

  Kimmy the server introduced himself with such familiarity that I was tempted to invite him to join us. I prefer red wine myself but ordered a bottle of white Sancerre, one of Wanda’s favourites. After all, it was her birthday.