“That’s wonderful,” I say, staring down at the flowers that I forgot I was holding. I reach out awkwardly and give them to her and she touches my hand lightly.
“I’ll come back tomorrow with some games,” I whisper to Cody, as I turn quickly to go.
I stop at the nurses’ station outside and see Jane. “I can’t believe it,” I whisper. “He made a complete turnaround.”
“We were all surprised,”she says.
I think of what Antonio said.
“Children have energy, strong spirits, great resources. Nature wants them to survive. By instinct, they fight. And there is…healing.”
I’m tempted to run to the beach to tell him.
Only I think he already knows.
Even though I’m not officially on duty, I read to some of the other kids, then go the pharmacy for an older woman who forgot to bring toothpaste and doesn’t like the hospital brand. As I’m leaving at the end of the day, an ambulance pulls up.
“Car accident,” a nurse tells the desk.
I rush to leave before they come in. I unlock my bike and pedal fast, taking the path along the beach.
nineteen
Visits with Antonio are part of my routine now. I stop to see him almost every day on the way home from the hospital. I’ve heard people talk about mentors, even though I’ve never really understood before what people like that are like. But now that I’ve met Antonio, I know.
His serenity and openness invite me to speak to him and sometimes I surprise myself and tell him more than I thought I would. The hospital, my home, my parents—even their divorce. He listens, but he never tells me what to do. Only sometimes he raises a hand to stop me. I wait for him to speak, but even then, it’s just a few sentences, but with weight and spirit. He’s almost…Godlike, and I’m in awe of him. I tell him about Cody and think about asking him whether he knew, but I look at him and his eyes answer.
Antonio knows all about me, but I don’t know much about him, so I ask him about growing up in Brazil. I’ve never met anyone from there before. All I learned in school about the Amazon is that it’s the world’s largest river and that no bridges cross it.
He has a far away look in his eyes when he answers, as though his mind has traveled back home and he’s telling the story from there, seeing it all again as if he’s a child again.
“I was born in Manaus,” he says. “My father was a shaman.”
“A what?”
“A shaman is a healer of the rainforest who walks between the visible and the invisible worlds. Plants and spirits were his medicines.” He shakes his head, as if in wonder. “He could look into other people’s dreams,” he says. “And he would have great dreams of his own, of vision and power.”
“How did he learn everything?”
“He was an apprentice to another shaman. One passes the information to another. There are no schools for that.”
“So when you were growing up and you got sick he’d find you the right plant and then pray?”
“Something like that,” he says, holding a hand out in the air. “The rainforest is filled with life,” he says, making a big arc with his hand. “There are a million different types of plants—almost three quarters of the animals and plants in the world. Everywhere you go, Sirena, there’s wildlife and the music of nature and color, intense, brilliant color.” He smiles. “They say there are four thousand different kinds of butterflies, Sirena. Can you imagine?”
Many Western medicines come from the rainforest, he says, but only one percent of all the plants have been studied for their use as medicines. “Some say the rainforest has a medicine for every disease.”
“I want to go, I want to see it all.”
“Ah, but there are more than plants and butterflies.” He shakes a finger in warning. “Do you like mosquitos? There are clouds of them.”
I shake my head. “I hate them, no.”
“What about spiders, poison frogs, jaguars, tarantulas as big as my hand, and snakes—many, many snakes?”
I shake my head again.
“You know the anaconda?” His arm becomes an undulating snake.
“Only from a horror movie.”
Antonio laughs. “Some say they have seen anacondas as long as sixty feet—a six-story building. Can you imagine?”
“Are you scared of them?”
“Only a fool wouldn’t be.”
Even though he never worked as a doctor, he studied with his father, he says, and learned how to heal himself with plants. “But cures come from spirits too. They enter your heart and soul. You have to give yourself over to the healing journey.”
“But in this country, what do you do when you get sick?”
Antonio shakes his head. “I don’t get sick,” he says. “I’ve never been to the doctor.”
“But if you did?”
“I’d boil the bush.”
“What?”
“I’d take the plants I need.”
“So you’ve never taken antibiotics for ear infections, or aspirin for headaches?”
“I don’t get headaches, Sirena, but if I did, I would chew the leaves of feverfew.”
“What’s that?”
“Nature’s aspirin—a plant that helps the pain. But to truly heal, you have to have a spiritual relationship with the plant. You have to want it to work. People in this country…they don’t understand that. Medicine here can be cold, one sided. It treats the symptoms, not the disease. Here they don’t understand that the mind and body are one.”
He tells me about saving the Amazon jungle and the rainforest. “It’s called the earth’s lungs,” he says, because it makes one-fifth of the world’s oxygen.
But people rob the jungle, taking out the timber, he says. “Half the animals and plants in the world will be destroyed over the next few decades.” Antonio puts down his paint brush. “People too,” he says. “There used to be ten million Indians in the jungle. Do you know how many are left?”
I shake my head.
“One hundred, two hundred thousand, maybe.”
“What happened to them all?”
“They were wiped out by Europeans who came to exploit the jungle and make money.”
“Why can’t anyone stop them?”
“The selfish move faster than the selfless,” he says.
“Can’t the government help?”
“They’re part of the problem, Sirena.”
When I finally remember that Aunt Ellie’s waiting for me for dinner, the sky has turned velvet blue. I get to my feet. “I was so lost in what you told me that I’m late.”
“Then you must go, you don’t want to miss dinner.”
As I start to pedal away, Antonio calls out to me. “Be careful, Sirena.”
“Of what?” I get ready to shout back, but I stop. I’m too far away, and Antonio’s a little hard of hearing.
twenty
So you like working at the hospital?” Mark says.
“It’s fun to be with the kids,” I say, surprising myself.
“You look happier.” He glances at Aunt Ellie, who pretends not to notice.
While Mark is cooking, I look at the clock. “What time is dinner?”
“An hour or so.”
“Can I go for a swim?”
“As long as the lifeguard is still on,” Aunt Ellie says.
He’s not in his chair when I get there, but he’s probably just somewhere else on the beach because he’s still supposed to be on duty. I swim out past where the waves break. My arms are stronger now and I can go farther without getting winded. The sun is lower and the water feels cooler. I swim out past where the waves break, lying back and watching the light in the late afternoon sky. When I’m finally ready to turn and go back, I hear something in the water.
For no reason, I swim out farther and farther. I’m afraid to turn around, only I’m not sure why. My breathing gets faster, my head pounds. What is it? What could it be?
The sound gets closer and closer and t
hen smack, my hand slams something hard. I look up, startled.
I turn and then I see what’s come up next to me.
A fast-moving surfboard.
He’s stretched out, naked from the waist up. He glides up alongside me, like a submarine that has silently risen to the surface.
I keep going.
“Time to get out,” he says, finally.
“What?”
He turns the board abruptly, cutting in front of me. “Look how far out you are. You can’t make it back on your own.”
“How do you know?” Irritation creeps into my voice. I’m short of breath, but I work to hide it.
“Get on the board, Sirena. I don’t want to have to pull you out.” He pushes up to a sitting position, his legs straddling the board. There’s room behind him now, only I don’t know how to hoist myself up, or even if I can.
Before I can ask, he holds his hand out to me. “Here.”
I grab his hand and he pulls me closer. I press down on the board with my hands raising myself high enough to swing a leg over and climb on. I breathe hard, trying to catch my breath. He shoots me a look of annoyance.
I was farther out than I thought. What if he hadn’t been there? He leans forward and paddles with his hands as my eyes follow the fluid movements of his shoulder muscles under his smooth skin. We glide through the water without talking. Silence doesn’t seem to bother him, but I feel the need to say something, anything, so he thinks I’m at ease and this is totally no big deal. Only small talk eludes me. My mind blanks.
His nearness alters my brain waves, the rhythm of my heart. My body downshifts from thinking to feeling…to longing.
I’m powerless, hard-wired to react only to him, like a helpless victim of my blood chemistry.
Can he tell?
He doesn’t speak, but his presence does. His radar is everywhere, watching the beach in front of him, sensing me and everything around us. I draw energy from him as if it passes through his skin to mine, taking me to a more vivid dimension of feeling, being and knowing.
When we get close to where the waves break, he tilts his head back.
“Hold on.”
He reaches back, his hand momentarily grazing my thigh. I lean into him, my arms tighten around his waist as the waves bounce us up and down, dousing my heat with their cool spray. We’re skin-to-skin, two bodies melded together as one. I’ve forgotten about swimming out too far, or what I should have known. Everything is right now.
I don’t want this to end.
I want to stay where I am with him, in the water, forever.
“I’ve never been on a board before,” I whisper in his ear. “It’s fun.”
He glances back at me and a hint of a smile crosses his face. He stops paddling and we sit as the waves carry us up and shoot us down, again and again, each time propelling me against him.
We’re connected now
And I’m in overdrive. Is this sane?
“I used to be afraid of the water.” Why did I tell him?
“And now?”
“Not anymore.”
“You should be.”
I didn’t expect that, not from him. “Are you?”
“It’s more awe than fear. It’s the power that draws me. But it’s an unfair contest.”
“Ocean worship? It sounds like a religion.”
“Yes,” he says with a smile. “The water is my god.”
Then I want to enter your church.
But I don’t say that.
We sit there together and time passes. Seconds? Minutes? I can’t tell. I’m a giddy kid on a rocket ship ride, thrusting forward and back, up and down with the waves, until our precious time together runs out. How much longer do we have left, just the two of us, in our water world apart from the shore?
My lips nearly touch the back of his neck. His hair blows back, against my face, covering my eyes. I’m blind to everything but him. I cling to waist inhaling his warm, coconut scent, my breath coming faster and harder than it should. Is this what making love feels like? How can he not sense my aching attraction, the sweet, intoxicating chemistry, the way the air is ignited between us?
I exhale against him in total surrender. He doesn’t bruise, but does he shiver? Does he feel? Respond? I have to know, only what do I ask? As if in answer, he arches back against me, his cheek grazing mine.
“Sirena,” he whispers.
twenty-one
At close to ten that night my dad calls. I’m on the window seat of my great ocean liner staring out at the crescent moon over the dark water. The ring startles me.
He sounds so alone. He’s not used to being on his own or cooking himself dinner. I remember his microwave meals, frozen on the inside, the nights my mom had to go somewhere and he was in charge.
I also remember other things now, things that I tried to forget. The phone calls I heard, but weren’t supposed to when I walked into his study without warning. The way his voice changed in a heartbeat, from low and intimate to cool and businesslike.
From wrong to right.
I block that from my head now.
He’s staying at a friend’s apartment for a while. He went out for a hamburger and a beer or three, I’m guessing. He calls because it’s his time to call. Okay, not fair, but they switch off. On even days my mom calls. Odd days, my dad. That way neither of them can blame the other for forgetting.
My dad isn’t great on the phone. To him it’s just a tool to give information or get it. He doesn’t know how to fill up the conversation.
“So how’s my girl?”
“Good.”
“How’s Ellie treating you?”
“Good.”
There’s an uncomfortable pause and I work to fill it.
“How’s work?”
“Same old, same old.”
My dad’s a contractor and he spends six days a week fixing people’s homes and, as he says, “making their dreams come true.” That means remodeling big kitchens with islands and backyards with pools and spas. I think he’s happier with a hammer, nails, and a glue gun than with people. He knows what to expect with tools. If they’re treated the way they should be, there aren’t too many surprises. Even if he had problems though, he wouldn’t say. He’d think, what was the point? Pragmatic. That’s the vocab word that suits him.
“So how do you fill your day?”
I tell him about practicing swimming and how I’m getting better at it, and about volunteering at the hospital. Also about Antonio. “He’s eighty years old and eighty years smart.”
“So then I have nothing to worry about,” he says, a smile in his voice.
If he only knew.
I wake closer to lunch than breakfast. The sweet, buttery scent of baking wafts through the air. More Norman Rockwell than my home-sweet-home, but whatever. On the kitchen stove there’s a black iron cupcake tin filled with golden popovers with swelled heads like swollen muffin tops. Would Aunt Ellie have baked them even if I wasn’t here? I decide she would. She does things like that. Baking bread and cakes, making homemade jam, even making pickles out of cucumbers which I didn’t think you could do on your own. For her it’s probably fun because she doesn’t have to do it. No one comes home pissed off expecting dinner on the table.
“They’re not hot anymore,” Aunt Ellie says. She watches me stumble to the table. “You must have been tired.”
I devour three popovers with strawberry jam and drink a glass of milk, studying the carton of organic low-fat milk. It’s dark green and plum with little cows in a field like a Ben & Jerry’s tableau. About as real as Legoland.
The kitchen is bright with sun. I notice for the first time that the green painted chairs around the table match the yellow-green grass outside. I also notice a slant to the floor. It’s an old house, maybe that’s why. Outside, the seagulls soar above the beach. They sound excited to be alive and have the entire sky to themselves, like ice skaters on an empty rink.
Everything is right about this new day. It feel
s like a new season, a fresh beginning. I look at the clock. He’s been on duty for three hours. Is he thinking about me? Remembering? I can’t get him out of my head. The feel of my arms around his waist. His warm skin against mine. His sweet smell. His nearness. I’m drunk with him and I don’t want to get sober.
Even through my thick web of sleep, I saw his face. He was watching me. Dreams last only minutes, they say, but this lingered through the night, fading in and out as if we stayed together, entwined, stepping outside one universe and entering another where only we existed.
I wash my dishes, lost in thought. I find myself standing at the sink, staring at the bottle of green dishwashing liquid as if it’s some odd find. I forget what I was planning to do next as if my mind and my body have separated inexplicably. Then I remember the shower. Slowly, I make my way upstairs.
Only now I don’t use the white Dove soap in the bathroom. I go to my makeup bag and get the soap Marissa gave me last Christmas. It was in a glittery sack with makeup from Sephora. On the pink wrapper, gold letters spell: Intoxication.
“For SPECIAL occasions only!” she wrote on the gift tag. She surrounded the note with red hearts from a glittery pen. I tear open the paper and sniff the sweet, musky perfume. When I come out of the bathroom, Will is sitting on my bed. He lifts his head and gets to his feet, ambling over to sniff my skin, detecting something new and curious, something he needs to take note of.
I put on shorts and a T-shirt and bike into town. Before I go the beach, I want to make a stop. The sun is warm on my face as I make my way along the main street. I steal a glance at myself in store windows—casual looks, so no one knows I’m checking myself out.
I look leaner now than when I first got here and my arms are stronger, even though they’ll never be sculpted the way his are, each muscle so distinct he could pose for an anatomy chart, the kind they put up in the gym. My hair is full and the layers are longer and it’s blonder from the sun. It cooperated today. It feathers around my face instead of poking out everywhere. I stand straight, not slumping, my mom’s words echoing in my head: “Stand tall, head high, shoulders back.”
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