The Language of Cherries

by Jen Marie Hawkins

  She couldn’t think straight enough to decide which one she wanted it to be.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Oskar’s Journal

  Never once has a girl so brazenly flirted with me.

  But that’s because all the girls I know

  have heard me speak.

  This is a different situation entirely.

  Because I can be whoever she’s already decided I am.

  The intensity in her eyes worries me, though.

  Like she’s already too close to the truth.

  When she looks at me like this,

  it’s like she can pick apart my life

  with her inquisitive smile.

  Like the universe

  may tell her

  whatever she wants to know

  because it’s just as brainwashed

  by the way stolen cherries

  stain her mouth

  as I am.

  And yet I’m drawn to it.

  I try to recover

  But even the strings inside my head

  are broken now.

  I retreat from her stare

  and turn my attention to her painting.

  It hits me then.

  The past bombards me.

  A little boy that looks just like Ivan

  hunches at the foot of my tree

  in her painting.

  My lungs stop budging,

  even under the pressing need for air.

  The wild cowlick at the crown of his head

  makes his cottony hair stand up.

  His elbows are rusty

  as an old spigot.

  So real.

  So alive.

  So perfect.

  I expect to hear

  our mother yelling

  from inside the painting

  to come in, wash up for dinner.

  On his feet are the little black boots

  he was wearing the day of the accident.

  Agnes and I found one of them

  in the field next to the road

  when we returned

  to the crash site

  weeks later.

  I swallow

  the ball of knives

  wedged in my throat

  and wonder

  how

  this girl knows

  about my dead brother.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Evie

  Evie had seen a lot of weird things since she’d arrived in this foreign land: sheep wandering down paved roads, food with eyeballs intact, glaciers touching volcanoes.

  And all of that was before she’d even left the airport. But what she saw now in the boy’s expression took the prize for strangest.

  His eyes resembled thick storm clouds, even more so with the moisture brimming in them. She made a mental note to learn how to say What did I do now? in Icelandic. Emotion darkened his face for a few moments as he looked back and forth between her painting and her face. Evie’s chin quivered and she clamped her teeth shut, at a loss.

  “What? Is it that bad?”

  But he turned his back and retreated, climbing a tree further away. His boots stomped the rungs with more force than necessary.

  He’d crept onto her canvas before she ever met him. Something irrational made her wonder if the young boy in the painting was him when he was little. Maybe she had some kind of weird, dreamy insight into his life and it made him uncomfortable. The resemblance was undeniable.

  “Why are you stomping?” She mimicked his motions, hoping to establish some line of communication. Little flickers of chilly dirt sprayed the tops of her feet.

  No response. The dribble of cherries got quieter as the bucket filled.

  With a resigned sigh, she sank to the ground and returned to her painting. She touched up the foreground with a few of the cottony-looking dandelions she’d noticed growing near the water’s edge, then brushed wisps of clouds in the sky.

  Sadness trickled over her skin like a slow-starting rain.

  Her paintings always conveyed the emotion of a scene, the way she felt when she heard a certain song. The ones she wanted to paint, anyway. The ones she painted as assignments all had the same flat, heartless void. Maybe that’s why she’d never received anything better than mediocre marks on the art she was forced to create. She spent too much time comparing her work to others, trying to cover up her brushstrokes. That’s what had happened with the self-portrait. She blended and blended until it didn’t look like her at all. Be honest about the flaws, her art teacher had said, making an example of her in class. When she brought that assignment home, Papá had applauded it—because he thought it was a portrait of Abuela.

  That’s why she didn’t want to go to art school, no matter how many times Papá had mentioned it. Only her original compositions, the ones made under the spell of music, were worthy of a second look. She had to want to create something in order to make it beautiful.

  Things were different in this orchard, though. Staring at her work now, she didn’t need the measures of a chorus to know that, if this scene had been based on a song, it would’ve been a sad one.

  When Oskar moved to another tree, she’d had enough of the silent treatment. She stood up, gathered her things, and moved them to the base of his ladder. She waited until he met her gaze before she sat down again. Just because he didn’t speak English didn’t mean they couldn’t communicate.

  “Do you know something about my painting?” She pointed and gave him an exaggerated shrug.

  His gray eyes narrowed and his jaw tensed. His lips tightened into a straight line as he returned to plucking. She waited, as though the spell would suddenly be broken and he’d talk back to her. The tattoo on his arm clenched and expanded under his t-shirt sleeve with the movement of his arm, like hieroglyphics in motion. Three lowercase i’s leaned into one another, surrounded by a circle.

  Evie blinked. “Your tattoo! It’s the same symbol from the rock. That’s where I’ve seen it before.”

  Nothing. Not even a grunt. He wasn’t going to try.

  Fine. Maybe she would do all the talking for a change.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Oskar’s Journal

  I thrash around in the jaws of a trap.

  Agnes must have sent her to pester me.

  My aunt is always reminding me

  of the things I should be doing.

  Be more social and make some friends, Oskar.

  Stop isolating yourself from the world, Oskar.

  That’s easy for her to say.

  Since I can remember

  I’ve made people uncomfortable.

  When I lost my family, things got worse.

  Their expressions say what their lips don’t:

  Poor, motherless boy.

  Fatherless boy.

  Brotherless boy.

  Can’t even string a sentence together.

  My peers won’t look me in the eye.

  I’ve only ever had one friend,

  and friend is a loose term.

  It’s more of a business arrangement.

  Maybe I like that you don’t talk to me,

  she calls to my back.

  Taunting.

  Paranoia creeps up.

  Does she know I’m faking?

  The painful accuracy of her painting tugs at me.

  I want to look at it again and see my perfectly rendered little brother,

  as real on her canvas as the leaves beneath my fingers.

  But there’s no way she could know about Ivan

  unless Agnes told her.

  She talks as she paints,

  refusing to take my hints to shut up.

  Boys who talk never say the right thing, anyway.

  Of course not, princess.

  That’s what I want to say,

  in a smooth, devil-may-care way.

  Impossible, of course.

  This guy back home kissed me

  before I left to come here.

  And do you know what he
said before he did it?

  She shudders to herself.

  I wanna taste you.

  My hands tighten around the bucket handle.

  Can you believe that?

  Maybe I wanted to kiss him

  until he opened his mouth,

  but that killed it.

  I try to picture her kissing someone

  but stop the exercise immediately when I realize

  I can only picture her kissing me.

  Because seriously, where the hell did he get that?

  A dollar store erotica novel?

  She cuts her eyes up at me.

  I’ve stopped picking cherries to listen.

  I didn’t let it go further.

  Got in my car and drove off.

  Pretty sure he’s banging my best friend now.

  So it’s probably for the best.

  She shrugs like she doesn’t care.

  But it’s obvious that she does.

  Hopefully he got to know her

  before making her part of his daily calorie intake.

  Zip-It and Bitchface, sitting in a tree.

  I have no idea what she’s talking about.

  She drops her paintbrush in her water bottle

  and wipes remnant reds and greens

  on her jeans

  as I descend the ladder.

  I want to tell her not to ruin those jeans.

  Those perfect jeans.

  But maybe she has more.

  Maybe all jeans hug her body

  the way the stupid parts of me want to.

  So I guess you’re done now?

  She eyes my bucket.

  I glance down.

  It’s full.

  About-facing,

  I turn toward the barn.

  Irritated with myself for lingering

  and allowing her to notice.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Evie

  An email from her mother waited for Evie when she got back to the guesthouse.

  Evie, I’ve been trying to reach you via video chat. We need to discuss plans for the school year. Ping me when you get this message.

  Yeah, no thanks. She’d already told her she wasn’t interested in going to the Magnet Arts Academy in New York City before she and Papá had ever left Florida. If Papá’s travel schedule kept him out of the states by September and prevented her from returning to school at Saint Bart’s, she’d just emancipate herself or something. No way in holy hell would she start over somewhere else her senior year.

  And with her mother, of all people!

  This was the woman who had different eyes and hair and nose from her. This white lady, who everyone always assumed had adopted Evie out of the goodness of her heart, when that was anything but the case. Evie never would’ve believed she’d come from her if her papá hadn’t watched her emerge with his own eyes.

  She’d lived to criticize her. She’d reminded Evie, on nearly a daily basis, of all the ways in which she was lacking. Her cruelty refueled itself on her daughter’s silent pain. Despite all this, Rhona had some kind of inescapable hold on her until the summer when Evie turned thirteen—when everything changed for good.

  Since she’d finally wrestled free of her mother’s resentful grasp, she had no reason to ever want to be near it again.

  Evie lounged on her bed and ate the pilfered cherries she’d collected. Why not, right? She spent the day blathering to a strange foreign boy who couldn’t care less about her company, she was hallucinating subjects for her paintings, and Papá wasn’t back—as usual—so she figured she might as well eat her feelings.

  Her feelings turned into another sketch, and then a painting as the evening stretched on, unending daylight streaming through her window. It materialized on the canvas, so potent with melancholy she could hardly remember she was the painter instead of the subject under her brush.

  A woman kneeled, facing her. Long strands of penny-red hair blew around the woman’s young, rosy face. Her green eyes twinkled, either from sadness or hope—those two things were always so hard for Evie to differentiate—and she reached toward something off canvas, something that’d sit right in Evie’s spot. Rich, dark soil caked her fingernails and speckled her hands and forearms. Loamy piles of it clumped at her knees.

  Evie thought maybe the woman was digging.

  How could it be that she didn’t know for sure? Once again, the scene had turned Evie into a marionette, painting its every command. She put the finishing touches in the background—rolling hills, a body of water, and a distant lighthouse behind her on the horizon. It was then she realized that it was background scenery from the orchard, except without the cherry trees.

  But what was this woman digging? What do people dig when they’re sad? A thought tugged at Evie.

  A grave.

  Chills spread over Evie’s arms, all the way up to her ears. She didn’t like thinking about graves or dying or death. It always led her back to the certainty that she’d outlive Abuela. Age was a cruel thing. Abuela was getting older now, within a decade of normal human life expectancy. Give or take. Evie tried to push the fear away, but in the silence of a room that wasn’t even hers, she couldn’t shut it out.

  Thousands of miles away, Abuela was trapped in an assisted-living apartment. She saw nobody but the nurse who came to deliver her meds twice a day and occasionally her neighbor, who rolled an oxygen tank between hacking coughs. Clunk clunk clunk over the floorboards, the noise carried through the walls. Evie grimaced at the memory of that sound, of the lost freedom it represented.

  Abuela no longer baked pastelitos for her Little Havana neighborhood. Evie wondered if the neighborhood kids still lounged around on the porch of her empty house, dripping the fillings of somebody else’s kitchen creations on their shirts.

  Abuela no longer played dominoes with the hermanitas from the Fifth Street parish. She no longer took walks to Miss Izzy’s to hand-deliver baked goods. She no longer spent hours listening to Bob Marley, or cooking in the dingy little kitchen, or painting with her granddaughter. She’d been stripped of her identity and locked away, because nobody was home to look out for her.

  The weekend before Evie left for Iceland, which was also the weekend before they’d moved Abuela into the retirement village, the two of them had sat on the porch painting pictures of the ocean, with “High Tide or Low Tide” playing on repeat—a rare warm weather session. Bugs swarmed around the porch light, and the two swatted at them when they’d perch on their skin, damp from the Miami heat that never let up, even after dark. Look at me, nieta, I’m a regular Picasso! Abuela exclaimed after a failed attempt at a seagull made her give up and fling a blob of paint on the canvas to cover the mistake. The two of them had melted into pools of sweat and giggles. Things were as fine as they’d ever been.

  Evie vehemently disagreed with Papá’s decision to put her in assisted living. It’s not like the original incident had been that big a deal in the first place. Abuela had simply gone for a walk one day and got turned around, lost her way back home. It happened to people all the time. Abuela’s sense of direction just wasn’t what it once was. And the fact that it got dark that one particular time made it worse.

  But then it happened a second time. And then a third.

  They’d tried to convince her to stop taking walks alone, but Abuela was the independent type. She had to be. She’d been dropped in the country in 1960, barely a teenager, on Operation Pedro Pan. She didn’t know a soul when her feet touched American soil, nor a single syllable of English. She’d found her way then. She always found her way.

  Guilt tugged at Evie, though. They’d left her there, just like Abuela’s parents did—and for reasons much less valid than escaping a communist regime. Abuela forgets things, Papá had said. But how could they expect her to remember anything, when all evidence suggested she herself had been forgotten?

  Evie couldn’t lose Abuela. The only times she really felt like she knew herself was on that porch swing, or in her faded yellow
kitchen. It was the only time she was somewhat okay with the way her parents always had better things to do than spend time with her, even when she was just a little kid.

  “Evie?”

  She whirled around, breathing in the scent of the frigid evening air Papá brought with him. She had been so lost in her sadness she hadn’t heard him open the door.

  “Are you crying? What’s wrong, mija?”

  A moment later she was curled against the stiff cold clinging to his coat, face pressed hard into a button that would surely leave an imprint on her forehead. His hug almost wrung out all the borrowed sadness from her canvas.

  “Evie, your paintings! Espléndido!” The exclamation was enough to slow her tears. Excitement blew his words wide open, stamping everything she’d done with his endorsement. “Look at the detail.” He let her go and stepped closer to get a better look. “Which song is this from? Tell me so I can listen.” His eyes flashed with investment.

  Evie wiped her tears and cleared her throat. She hated how much she needed this approval. “It isn’t from a song. I might’ve seen it somewhere before, I don’t know.”

  “These are fantastic.” His eyes played between the woman on her knees and the boy in the orchard. She’d had the good sense to put her first painting in the closet and cover it with a blanket. No way could she risk him seeing that one.

  “I’m sorry you’re sad, Evie. But this—es temporal.” He gripped her shoulders and forced her to face him. His tired eyes shimmered with relief. “This is good, though. I’m glad you’re painting again.”

  Evie nodded, another tear slipping from between her lashes. “I miss Abuela.”

  “Listen, mija,” Papá said, voice brimming bright with optimism. “I know you miss her, but she’ll be so excited to see these paintings when we go to visit her.”

  Visit implied she’d always be locked away. Under surveillance. Evie clamped her trembling lips together, pressing both hope and rebellion back down her throat. “When we get back home, you mean? When things go back to normal?”