The Language of Cherries

by Jen Marie Hawkins

  Fat, icy raindrops

  pelt the top of my head

  as I move through the orchard

  toward the warm shelter of the store.

  They slide over my scalp, running through the maze of hair

  until they gather at the base of my neck.

  I pause under the overhang

  outside the door

  and shake myself off like a mongrel.

  I’ll finish this tomorrow

  or when the sky stops weeping.

  Whichever comes first.

  There are days when I wish my family

  had never planted this orchard.

  Sometimes I think we’d be better off,

  Agnes and me,

  if we didn’t have to tend

  the abandoned dreams of loved ones lost.

  But my aunt is a typical pushy Scot

  about the property my parents left in her care.

  I figure I take more after

  the Icelandic side

  of my family.

  But Agnes is all the family I have now.

  Get ye to gatherin’, Oskar!

  Agnes’s Scottish brogue

  booms off the wood-paneled walls in the shop

  the minute I step back inside.

  We can’t waste ’em.

  They’re ripenin’ faster than I can fill the jars!

  She drops her ladle into a tall, steaming pot

  and wipes her hands on the front of her apron,

  smearing warm cherry preserves

  across starched white cotton.

  I point to the window with a grimace

  rather than replying

  to avoid my inevitable stutter.

  But—Bs are the worst.

  They glue my lips together like bark gum.

  Rain slicks the glass, pooling in the sills.

  So what? Agnes says. It’s rainin’!

  You can sit on yer dry arse this winter,

  when we have plenty to get us through the cold.

  She pushes a hefty bucket across the counter.

  The metal screeches to a stop as it hits me in the stomach.

  I narrow my eyes and grab it.

  Shove that snarl back inside yer head, boy.

  Tuck it under that mop of hair.

  She thunders back over to her pot on the stove,

  watching from the corner of her eye as I about-face.

  I breeze through a narrow aisle of homemade jams and pies

  and push the side door open with a whoosh.

  The wind snatches it and slams it against the barn-red exterior.

  The overabundance is my fault.

  Because I’ve been lazy.

  I’ve been gathering cherries

  from the base of the Aisling tree.

  The one tree we aren’t supposed to harvest.

  Never mind the fact it’s my tree.

  It’s easy pickings,

  because the fruit gathers right on the ground.

  When I don’t have to use a ladder,

  I can scoop them by handfuls.

  The faster I’m done,

  the faster

  I’m free.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Evie

  Evie pirouetted through the bleary in-between bordering asleep and awake.

  Tingly edges of a dream tugged at her. It whispered gauzy coils into her head, asking permission to materialize, but the remnants were strange, hard to mold with concrete things like words. A nearby animal grunt nudged her, once and for all, away from her slumber. She opened her eyes to complete darkness.

  What the…

  Then she remembered the eye mask.

  Snatching it upwards, her matted lashes met splotches of light. She crawled on her hands and knees across the disheveled bed and opened the shade. The blazing glow made her recoil. Focusing through a painful squint, she found the source of the noise. A puffy white sheep toed at the dirt outside her window. It turned and made eye contact with her and spewed the most godawful noise she’d ever heard through its flat yellow teeth.

  She shrieked, flailing her arms. If the window had been open, she could’ve reached out and shoved it. It chewed a sloppy mouthful of something and looked away, bored.

  In her suburban Florida bedroom, Evie often woke to the sounds of lawn mowers and laughter. But never had bleating sheep interrupted her slumber at—she glanced at the antique cat clock on the wall—noon. Mother Mary, she’d slept until noon!

  The sheep whined again and she yanked the shade closed, rubbing her face and collapsing backward onto the squeaky mattress. Out of habit, she reached over and touched her laptop to life, still open where she’d left it.

  Ben Benson – active 9 hours ago.

  Another gasp sucker-punched her lungs. He’d responded, and of-freaking-course she’d missed it.

  Ben Benson – Wanna grab some grub after work tomorrow? (9 hours ago)

  Huh? Her brows cinched. She’d been gone a week. Surely he hadn’t forgotten already. She blinked a few times and clicked refresh. After a ten-second delay, another message populated the thread.

  Ben Benson – My bad. That was meant for Loretta. You doing ok? Hope your having fun in Greenland. (8 hours ago)

  She stuck a mental thumbtack in the grammar blunder and concentrated on the other thing he said. Greenland? And even worse—Meant. For. Loretta.

  She let it settle in.

  Loretta was her best friend. Supposedly. Loretta didn’t read or paint or even listen to the same kind of music as Evie. But Loretta knew people, and she’d taken Evie under her wing at school junior year—even convincing her to start going by her full name. Evie is a little girl name, Loretta had said, flicking a wisp of blond hair behind her thin shoulders, but Evelyn is sophisticated. Old-school names are in again, you know. Distinguishes you from all the Emmas and Brittanys.

  Everyone had always called her Evie. But she went along with Loretta’s identity overhaul, which included trading her flip-flops for heels, painting her nails, and going on a diet.

  Before all of that, Evie was a nobody, by their impossible standards, until Loretta scooped her into the fold. Maybe it made her a grade-A sellout, but reinventing herself had been the ticket to a real seat in the lunchroom and a coveted job at Wild Waves, since Loretta’s dad was part-owner.

  Loretta had been distracted lately, though. She barely managed to respond in complete sentences to Evie’s instant messages. Ben Benson might have something to do with that. Evie fisted a handful of comforter, letting the jealousy clamp like a vice around the muscles in her neck. Maybe calling dibs on a guy became void when you left the country.

  And Ben! He wasn’t exactly innocent either. She could forgive the fact that he regularly mixed up your and you’re, but he couldn’t be bothered to even remember which country she was in? She’d told him no less than three dozen times.

  She slapped the laptop screen shut and flung herself on a pillow. Loneliness would just have to be her new BFF here in Greenland—land of nothingness and sheep.

  As she hid behind her lids, trying to forget the full tank of anger with no place to go, her dream tried to surface again, like a ghost tapping her on the shoulder.

  She was in a cherry orchard—she knew that much for sure—and it was exactly as she’d first seen it in her imagination. A boy had stared through the leaves of a low branch at her. Probably Ben, since she’d fallen asleep thinking about him. But the details, like the boy’s face, evaded her, turning into a swirl of color that got blurrier by the minute.

  Like a painting left in the rain.

  On Christmas Eve last winter, she’d started a painting outside. It was meant to be a gift for Abuela. Tired eyes had halted her progress, so she went to bed and left it on the porch to dry. During the night, a winter rainstorm blew in and soaked the canvas. The paint drizzled into a river of blended hues. Though she knew what she had painted when she found it the next morning, if she stared at the blob too long, she could forget what had bee
n underneath.

  A similar sadness plagued her as the retreating dream smeared colors through her subconscious. She was forgetting what Ben looked like. Already. What a flake she was. Maybe that’s why it seemed like he had forgotten her, too.

  She turned her head away from the glare of daylight, searching for clarity, but instead found the heap of pricy art supplies on the wingback next to the bed. Her fingers fluttered against her will.

  Maybe she could translate that dream to canvas.

  She reminded herself she wasn’t going to paint. Her papá wanted her to, and he had enough control over the decisions affecting her future. She hung her feet off the end of the mattress and bounced them in a nervous rhythm, staring at the canvases. Maybe a little sketch wouldn’t hurt.

  She reached under the pile of clothes, toppling sweaters and scarves and art supplies to the floor, searching with her fingers. Once she found her bent-corner sketchbook and grabbed a pencil from her desk, she flipped open to an empty page and began to transcribe.

  Within a few minutes, the gentle swish of charcoal had rendered a black-and-white version of her dream. Evie propped the pencil against her lip, not quite satisfied. There was too much missing, too much still hiding in her brain.

  It needed color.

  She glanced at the acrylics, now lying on the floor with the clothes. Who was she really punishing if she didn’t paint? Evie didn’t like the answer.

  Anyway, it was past noon and based on the lack of response to her yell at the sheep, Papá wasn’t home early like he promised. There was nothing comforting about knowing nobody could hear her scream in this tiny, moss-covered hobbit hole. Refusing to paint wouldn’t change any of that.

  She forced herself off the bed, pulled the red crocheted beret Abuela had made over her bedhead hair, and slid her feet into flip-flops. Icelandic weather be damned. Her jaw tightened as she shoved all of her supplies into her leather cross-body satchel and tucked a canvas under her arm. Screw it. She’d barely left this room since they arrived. If an orchard really grew in Iceland, she wanted to see it for herself.

  SHE WAS THROUGH the cottage and out the door in moments, gaining elevation through wet grass with every slippery step. The chilly wind breathed down her neck as she dodged sheep pellets littering her way. Maybe her shoe choice was ill conceived after all.

  When she crested the hill, the most sensational feeling of déjà vu silenced the swishing of her silk pajama pants and she froze mid-stride. The horizon opened onto a show-stopping panorama.

  Holy shit.

  There really was an orchard in Iceland—an exact replica of the one from her sketchbook and her dream. Little details swam to the surface in her mind, bit by bit, as she made her feet move again, toes pointing and planting down in the spongy earth.

  Dozens of cherry trees danced in the lukewarm breeze. Their sloping rows couldn’t have been more symmetrical if they were drawn on lined paper. They clung to the hillside as though determined, at some perfect moment, to slide into the glassy water below.

  Rays of sunlight glittered a magnificent sheen on waxy leaves and decadent red globes. Something enchanting shimmered in the leftover raindrops clinging to them. And just beyond the orchard on the edge of the water, a barn-like building loomed, painted cherry red to match. A few cars sat in the parking area out front. Across the distance of the water, a white lighthouse trimmed in deepest crimson jutted from the horizon, standing bastion at the edge of the sea.

  Evie had intended to set up and paint on the hill, but sweet-smelling breezes beckoned her forward and the landscape drew her into its essence. One moment she stood on the hill, taking in the scenery—the next, she stood at the fence in the back of the orchard, staring at the largest tree among them, so dazed she didn’t remember the walk itself.

  There was something different about this tree, and not just because it was the first one she came to after climbing through the bars of the white fence . It tugged at her heartstrings, a vague sense that it anchored everything below it. She set her supplies against a paint-chipped post. The soil under her feet gripped her flip-flop treads as she walked, making a sucking slurp when she stepped in the wettest spots. When she reached the shelter of the shade, she stilled, feeling oddly at ease. Welcomed, even.

  A cluster of cherries hung from a branch at eye-level, as if the tree reached out to hand them to her. The delicate ruby bulbs glistened as they touched her fingertips. She plucked a few and took them back to her spot by the fencepost, rolling one between her thumb and forefinger. The fragrance squeezed moisture into her mouth.

  She plopped one past her lips as she sank to the earth and set her tabletop easel on the ground. Silky flesh separated under her teeth, and the pulpy middle melted on her tongue, perfectly ripe and alive with possibility. She discarded the pit on the ground next to her. As she chewed the next two and propped her sketchbook against the fencepost, her dream’s details materialized in fragments.

  But was it a dream? It felt familiar, somehow—like a song she’d once heard but had forgotten the words to. She hurriedly set up her paints, determined not to lose her grip on it. The wet ground seeped through the thin silky pajamas and brought her back to reality, if only briefly, making her wish she’d brought a blanket to sit on. But a wet butt was a minor inconvenience in the urgency of the moment. She had to paint the scene tickling her cerebellum while it was fresh, emerging in bright flashes of light. It was just like all the times a song made her grab a canvas and rush to relay the scene, sometimes without a sketch.

  This time, there was no song to reference, no pause button to press, only a glimpse pinging around in her brain. She trembled as she mixed colors with sticky fingertips, hurrying to smear the paint and then wipe the excess on her knees.

  The first layer transpired into a barely coherent clump of color. Blues and grays and whites washed the sky; swaths of green bathed the ground. A second layer added depth and distance. Tree trunks of umber reached toward the sky with bony fingers. Rings of sunlight rimmed feathery white clouds.

  By the time she’d painted the third layer, her hand moved of its own volition. Like the minute hand of a clock, it knew exactly where to go without having to be told, and for just the right amount of time.

  Cherries thudded to the ground intermittently around her like an irregular heartbeat. The breeze exhaled a gasp that stole her crocheted hat and tossed it on the ground. She barely noticed as her hair whipped around her face and brushed her collarbone.

  Once she’d swept verdant leaves onto climbing branches and speckled them with cherries, she focused on the alabaster blob in the foreground. It was the only thing in her painting she didn’t have the advantage of glancing up to reference, because it huddled only within the confines of her subconscious—an abstract place she could only reach with a paintbrush.

  Slow and patient, stroke by stroke, it became a boy.

  The sinewy lines threading his torso and arms came to life beneath her smudged hands. She stared at the rendering, biting her quivering bottom lip. He had a farm boy’s body, scratched and dotted with dirt. A tattoo engraved his right bicep, a black symbol she’d never seen before. Three lowercase i’s leaned into one another—they looked like lit candles converging—and were surrounded by a circle. She painted the symbol without even glancing at her sketchbook for comparison, as though she’d invented the intricacies herself.

  As she added final touches—golden highlights in his messy blond hair, dimples twinkling against a stern jaw (left one deeper than the right), distressed denim clinging to his long legs, and a silver bucket overflowing cherries at his feet—her heart sped to a satisfied staccato.

  Decidedly not Ben Benson. If this boy were real, he’d know the difference between Iceland and Greenland. She’d bet on that.

  A dreamy haze swam laps around her as she studied her work. It was easily the most beautiful thing she’d ever painted. Completely ridiculous, but she was crushing on a boy she made up, falling in love with a song she’d never even h
eard.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Oskar’s Journal

  After unloading

  my third haul of cherries,

  I head to the back of the orchard.

  My clothes stick to me, damp from the morning rain.

  The sun stretches its muscles, growing warmer by the minute

  so I peel off my shirt and tuck it in my back pocket.

  I’ve waited months for winter to get out of my face,

  so I could feel sunlight on my skin.

  But most importantly,

  so I could get back to work on the lighthouse.

  It is the only remaining place

  I feel their presence

  rather than their absence.

  Today makes five years since the accident.

  It still pounds my ears

  like the torturous

  drum beat

  of memory.

  And if I think hard enough,

  glass shatters through a dizzy spiral

  of crumpling metal.

  But I sneak around the thoughts,

  sly as a thief.

  My broken strings echo

  louder

  and louder

  and louder

  when

  I

  sink

  into a pit of painful recollection.

  Not that I really talk to anyone besides Agnes,

  and she pretends not to notice

  when I trip over syllables

  and fall flat on my face.

  But lately, she notices other things.

  She peeks out the window, shamelessly spying on me.

  I wonder if she knows

  I’ve been bringing her cherries

  from the Aisling tree.

  I prop the ladder up and climb it,

  one rung at a time,

  in case she’s watching.

  I get to the top, set my bucket down and stop.

  Someone hums.

  A feminine melody

  braids itself into the breeze.

  There’s a splotch of red on the ground, bunched in a pile.

  A crimson hat points in her direction.

  My hands grip the ladder a little harder when I see her.