by Paula Jolin
“All right,” he said. “Fine. I went to the Crescent. I heard Glimmer was going to be there, and I heard she had some high quality stuff.”
Aliya shifted her body, breathed in sharply. “You couldn’t see me that night because of Glimmer?”
“I couldn’t come see you because of your parents.”
More silence.
Gillian couldn’t take her eyes off Aliya, off the bloodied T-shirt stuck to her arm. Behind her, Miya began to tap on the drum—padum, padum, padum—and the sound carried across the roof. Gillian felt a sudden rush of affection. Funny how it had crept up on her, liking them. Brave Miya, ready to fight with those tiny fists. Tolerant Aliya, who never held grudges. The closest thing she had to friends up here.
The closest thing she had to friends anywhere.
Trevor was going on. “She wasn’t even there,” he said, “so it’s nothing to get upset about. I pulled into the Crescent and just saw some guy shouting ‘fuck you, fuck you’ after a white car driving away. I didn’t feel like being alone”—Ha!—“so I pulled up. Talkative guy.”
Trevor dropped his head back, took in the stars like the story was done. Aliya and Miya, both stayed silent. Should Gillian say something? “How did you get from a conversation at the Crescent to the afterlife?”
“I told you, I’m not dead,” said Trevor, but his voice was strained, once again hard to hear. “Jack’s the one who’s dead.”
That got their attention. Even Rambling stopped his tailrapping. On the road below, a car zoomed by, going at least fifty. They all leaned over to look at it, and Gillian caught herself thinking: Did the jumbie conjure you up to illustrate his story?
Aliya recovered first. “You must remember more than that. What happened next?”
Trevor sighed. “He got in the car, that was next. Then I drove into the state forest while he told me the whole story. That was his girlfriend, dumping him because he was heading down to Mexico, not staying with her.” Trevor linked his hand through Rambling’s fur and let his face rest there for a second, half buried in dog. “The weirdest thing: turns out I actually knew the guy, and the girl dumping him, too. My cousin Katelin, and this was her boyfriend, Jack. We’d met at her sister’s wedding, sneaking gin and tonics off the drink trays. Which made sense because the Crescent is hidden away; to find it, you have to know it’s there. Katelin and I used to go there to smoke.”
“I know,” said Aliya.
Her words were soft, but they stopped Trevor in his tracks. Aliya ducked out from under his arm and the boy looked like she’d struck him across the face. Finally, he just said, “I offered to take him to the bus station. Least I could do.” He sunk both hands deeper into Rambling’s fur. “He said he had some time to kill before his bus, why not take a quick drive over the gorge, check out the moonlit visions of paradise.” Jumbie didn’t sound malevolent, did he? He sounded sad, scared, like a reckless boy who’d made a terrible mistake.
“And how’s the view from heaven?” Aliya, still Aliya, saying that. Her face gleamed paler now, almost ghostlike. Gillian could hardly make out her features. Did touching a jumbie make you fade away?
“We were racing, top down, I must have been doing a hundred. I mean, Mitsu wasn’t a convertible, but she could convince you she was. Best ride of my life.” Was that how the story ended? Trevor stared down at his knees—one heartbeat, two, ten. At last he said, “I barely remember what happened next. I spun around the corner, and, shit, there was nothing in front of me but air.
“The car headed down the cliff. I must have yanked open the door, must have shot out of the car just in time, but I swear I don’t remember. The next thing, I was waking up covered in dust, spitting dirt, with a monster headache. Mitsu was gone. And Jack. Where the hell was Jack?”
Trevor rubbed his hands across his eyes. There was a moment of furious blinking before he said, “I found his backpack at the side of the road—must have flung itself out, same way I did. Then I remembered that he put his seatbelt on. Jackass.” That word, that tone, sounded like Gillian describing Trevor, every time she’d thought about him going over the cliff. Was he—he couldn’t be—crying?
Aliya still wasn’t looking at him, but she spoke up anyway. “How could you let us think it was you?”
Trevor raised his hands as if to embrace her, then let them fall. “I didn’t. I didn’t mean to. All I could think was that I’d been drinking, I’d been flying up the road, I was going to jail.” And Trevor was off again. Now that he’d started telling his story, it seemed he couldn’t stop. He went on, all about his flight to the bus station and using Jack’s ticket and the threeday bus trip to the border. He crossed using Jack’s passport without even passing over a bribe. Proof of what she’d been saying for years: all white boys look alike.
So he wasn’t a jumbie after all? The whole thing was a mistake? Gillian frowned. Didn’t Aliya say something about Katelin’s boyfriend calling from Mexico? She couldn’t quite remember. Either way, poor Trevor. She found her heart was big enough to feel sorry for him after all. He woke up one morning a rich white boy living in a big house, and by midnight he was either dead or on a bus to nowhere. Who knew that one spur-of-the-moment decision to pick up a stranded guy would spin out so deadly?
What was that Trevor was saying? “. . . found a place to live in Mexico, it took all the money I had.” His eyes shifted around the roof: up at the stars, over to Miya, down to Rambling. They skirted right past Gillian. “Luckily, I got a kind of job. I’m settled now.”
“But that can’t be right,” said Aliya. Said what Gillian was thinking. “Jack called Katelin . . .”
“How’d you know about that?” Trevor sounded almost angry. When Aliya didn’t answer, he said, “I finally got the courage to google myself, and found out I was dead. And Jack . . . well, everyone thought—still thinks—he’s in Mexico. I fobbed off his parents with an e-mail, but I knew I’d have to talk to Katelin or she’d have rushed off down to Mexico and found . . . me.”
Rushed off to Mexico. Gillian found herself staring at Aliya’s bloodied and bandaged arm. Bloodied and bandaged because Gillian had rushed to diffuse the jumbie’s— Trevor’s—power. Just the way she was always rushing somewhere, rushing into something. Always thinking life would be pulsing with joy if she could just get to the right place. Up to the land of the free, where she wouldn’t have to worry about Mums. Back down to Trinidad where she’d sip rum punch, waves tickling her toes. Was it only last week nothing had mattered more? She found her voice, asked as decisively as she could: “What about me and Nick Loring? He says you owe him thousands of dollars or a bunch of girls.” She almost pointed out that she’d shaved down that debt with her skill at cards, but no need to start a conversation that might lead to razors. She’d tell Aliya and Miya later. Instead, she said, “And he’s not just talking money. He says if I don’t serve up the saltfish, he’s going to send his evidence straight to City Hall.”
But weren’t there other things she should be asking? About Mums and what the jumbie could do to protect her? Although if he wasn’t a jumbie and he wasn’t malevolent— he seemed to be neither, with his pizza breath and his verge of tears—then Mums should be just fine. Probably finer than fine, at an all night fete somewhere in Trinidad.
Ah, Trinidad. Gillian smelled the salt water, heard the Mighty Sparrow’s latest calypso, tasted the sweetness of a just-opened coconut. Trinidad is my land and of her I am proud and glad.
“Gillian? Gillian, are you listening?” Trevor. She’d gotten so used to his voice droning on, it passed for elevator music now. “I said, what thousands of dollars?”
“Weren’t you pimping Emmie? He showed me pictures, records . . .” Gorm, man. She’d been a bit of a cunumunu herself, hadn’t she?
“Pimping Emmie? You didn’t believe that crap, did you? He was stalking her for months—offered me five hundred bucks extra if I’d rearrange her schedule. Didn’t I tell you? No, I guess I never got the chance.”
Trev
or wasn’t waiting for her, he was pulling out his wallet, rifling through a thick sheaf of papers. “He didn’t tell you about the restraining order Emmie copied for me . . . Figured it burned up with me, probably. Idiot. I was going to put it in Aliya’s locker and have her give it to you. Seems stupid now, but I was worried about people seeing us together. I even sent Aliya an e-mail from my cell phone, told her to look out for it.” His head pivoted, and his eyes burned into Aliya’s. “I told Nick I gave you the copy I had, but I didn’t use your name, I said ‘my girlfriend.’ I used to like to say that, to pretend that we were for real, I wasn’t just your walk on the wild side.”
“You weren’t . . .” said Aliya. She trailed off. Trevor found what he was looking for, a crumpled and torn sheet of paper that he tossed across to Gillian. She grabbed it—not one piece of paper, but two, folded up. She smoothed them out, then leaned over to read by candlelight. The top sheet, an e-mail from Emmie—Gillian scanned it quickly. Underneath, the restraining order itself. Taken together: Nick Loring had been sexually harassing Emmie, stalking her, and he’d been playing around with Photoshop—Photoshop! Gillian had been taken in by a scrapbooked collage—and posting fake pictures of her on random Web sites.
She found herself sitting back again.
“Wave those in his face, and he’ll leave you alone. His filthy-rich parents settled with Emmie’s family, enough for her to go to college on, so they dropped the charges.”
No charges. That meant there was only one problem. “But what about my half of the Matchmaker—” But she figured it out before she got to the end of the sentence. I found a place to live in Mexico, it took all the money I had. Trevor had screwed her over after all. Damn selfish bastard, she would—
She unclenched her fingers, stretched them out one by one. Wasn’t it the she woulds that had been getting her into trouble all this time? She’d been so busy dreaming about her island in the sun, she’d put her life on hold. She’d never had a proper boyfriend, had she? Plenty of worthy guys in TnT, she’d always thought. Once I get there, I’ll start looking.
She’d never shouted herself hoarse over the Red Sox, never downed a stack of pancakes bathed in maple syrup, never learned to ski. Never stayed up all night baring her soul to her girlfriends. She looked at Miya, still leaning back against the edge of the slanting rooftop, at Aliya, coldshouldering Trevor. That last one, at least, she planned to change.
She had a lot more to build a life out of up here than she’d thought.
Something rubbed against Gillian’s back—what the hell?—her backpack, vibrating. Then she heard the Vol-ca-no. She fumbled in the pocket of her bag, came up with the phone. Sure enough—thank the Lord—it was Mums. “I gotta take this,” she said, opening the phone. “Good night, Mums.”
“Meh girl!”
“So,” said Aliya. Gillian caught her words to Trevor just before she turned her back on the little tableau behind her. “You never said why you’re back. You didn’t come for us”— her voice broke on the us—“and you didn’t come to give Gillian her money. So what did you come for?”
Trevor tightened his arms around the dog’s furry body. “I came to get Rambling.”
THIRTY-TWO
HE CAME BACK for Rambling.
It was the little things Aliya had always loved about Trevor: the way he draped his leather jacket over her shoulders without her even asking, the extra pizza he ordered so his mom would have something hot when she got home, the hours he spent calming Mal down after her date went disastrously wrong.
Risking his life—his freedom—for the dog he loved.
Aliya pressed her hand to her heart. It pounded wildly, as though she were still in that horrific moment when she saw Trevor rising over the side of the house, or that more horrific moment when Gillian lunged at him with a razor. Aliya found herself cradling her injured arm, still stuck in that most-unbelievable-of-all moment when she realized Allah had answered the prayers of a wayward Muslimah: Trevor was alive. After that, things had blurred, run together; she could only recall bits and pieces. Trevor’s leather-clad arms coming around her shoulders, his lips pressing hers, fierce, urgent, like he wanted to brand her, being enveloped in the Baldessarini she’d missed so much.
Even while he told his story: she sighed at parts, she pouted, she slipped out of his embrace, withdrew her hand— but all she had felt was joy, relief. No seventeen-year-old body could have room for more emotions than one, when that one was this intense. Now, sheltered in the arms of the boy she loved, she looked around. A few feet away, Gillian was saying quietly into the phone, “Yeah, I get it, but even a new boyfriend, a party at Level Two, still you could have called me.” Across the flat-topped roof, beside one of the remaining candles, sat Miya, eyes closed, face drained, leaning back against the slope. Here, a happy Rambling. There, a worried Trevor.
The tiniest pin pricked her happiness.
He was explaining: “. . . I couldn’t just leave him. My mother, you know my mom, she doesn’t like things that smell. I mean, she kicked my dad out, what would make her keep a dog? I kept thinking, I’ve screwed up so bad, but Rambling, he depends on me. A risk to come here, but Rambling deserves it, don’t you boy?” Rambling licked Trevor’s chin. “Friday night—I knew Luke would be out, seeing an indie band or something, and my mom would be in a bar with her friends, bitching about men.”
If he could plan this rescue mission so meticulously, why couldn’t he come back for real? Call his mom, hire a lawyer, figure a way out? She thought of Katelin: That bastard Jack, I’ll never forgive him, never.
She let go of his jacket, moved a step or two away. What had she been thinking?
Aliya was in love with—had been in love with—a generous boy, a loving boy, but one who couldn’t face his own mistakes.
“What are you going to do now, Trevor?” Her clipped tones, averted eyes, she could live with those, but she hated it that her voice bled hope. “Why not come and admit what happened? Maybe you wouldn’t go to jail; it was an accident, after all. They can’t prove you’d been drinking.”
“And crossing the border on someone else’s passport? They’ll get me on obstruction of justice, try to make me out a terrorist.” The words came quick and bitter, and she knew he’d been thinking about it. That said something, didn’t it? He wanted to come home, he just—he couldn’t bear it. Like her, and her two lives, and her inability to choose between security and independence.
No. Not like her. Not anymore.
“Here’s the thing,” said Trevor. “You could come with me. I, well, I dreamed it, but I never imagined . . . I was going to go by your house, stare at the place you live, let that be enough for me.”
Hadn’t been enough for her, though, when she thought he was dead.
“But now, seeing you, I can’t, I don’t want to give you up. Come back with me, Aliya, we’ll pretend we’re married. Hell, we’ll get married.”
“And what are you doing, Jack,” asked Gillian, turning away from the phone for 2 seconds, “down in Mexico? And what would your new bride do?”
Aliya shifted a little, and the roof under her feet seemed to shift with her.
“I got a job on a boat,” he said. “Crewing a catamaran. Doesn’t pay that much, but we take tourists out, sometimes I get great tips. And you can’t beat the weather . . .” He nodded, and Aliya noticed now how long his hair had grown, how dark the stubble made his chin. “Once I get a little capital, I’ll get a boat of my own.” Not the first time Trevor had talked about sailing. He had two shelves of model boats in his room, things he’d built himself. A pirate ship with a wooden plank, a British galley with a cloth flag.
He wasn’t looking at her. Again. “You know what I used to think about, those first few days down in Mexico? A long time in the future, when I’m established, I’ll come back and track you down, and make you love me under a different name.”
Not that everyone had to be practical, but there were limits.
“Oh, Aliya,” he s
aid.
Oh, Trevor.
“That’s ridiculous,” she told him. “You’ve got to come home. You can’t make a living as a boat bum. You can’t make a life out of that.”
“I agree,” said Miya. Aliya twisted around. Miya’s face looked wan and pale in the moonlight, exhausted, but it was the exhaustion that came with great achievement: crossing the finish line of a marathon, giving birth. She’d been so into the magic thing, used it like an enchanted rope to climb out of her pit of depression, Aliya’d expected its failure would crush her. Even wrapped in Trevor’s comforting arms, she’d worried about it. But I agree, said Miya. Some people were more resilient than you thought.
“I can’t make much of a life in prison either.” His dark eyes swept her back to their first meeting in the bus lanes. “You won’t come, will you?” he asked, but it sounded like You don’t love me.
“You won’t come back,” she said.
There they were, on opposite sides of a divide that was steeper than the cliff he’d driven off. Not the cultural one she had feared; they could bridge that with prayer mats and prayer chains, dinners of microwaved falafel and movies with subtitles. But he was a boy of escape, and she—well, she’d come here tonight, hadn’t she? She’d been lonely and confused and unable to go on, just the way he made it sound down in Mexico. But she’d realized she couldn’t make a life out of loneliness, out of confusion.
She’d come to say good-bye.
She forced herself to look up, to look into his shadowed face. What about the time she stormed out of the gazebo and he chased after her, caught her just before she reached the white fence? He’d grabbed her with the fierceness of today. I’ll never let you say good-bye, he told her between kisses. Never, never. What about the time—
But it was time she forgot about the times, wasn’t it? Time she realized that Trevor was not the glue that would stick her life together. She pictured Mama’s devastated face pressed up against the screen door, Baba’s eyes gone blank as he flipped through TV channels. She’d made a mess there. Time to try to go home and fix it, try to make her point again.
