Left at the Mango Tree

by Stephanie Siciarz

  Like Raoul at the library, Bang, Cougar, and Nat would resume their routines, too. Bang would smile at the tourists, entertain them with his pineapple tricks and sell them his hand-carved pen-knives by day, his words and his melodies by night. Cougar would furnish his hotel guests with charm and with overpriced maps, while the Belly’s visitors and the island girls would get rum and romance, respectively, overpriced as well. And Nat, Nat would drive his shiny taxis all around the island, one day picking up a girl, or a lady, who would indeed be satisfied with market-day t-shirts, a diet of fish, and his cottage with its new front door. Then at the end of the day, all four mates would meet for a drink at the Belly, none so petty as to forsake a friend over a dented harmonica or a bit of smuggling. Could Oh’s sandy shore ever forsake the vicious tide?

  Second chances on Oh are as prevalent as promises and mangoes, and Raoul—and his cohorts—had been so shaken up that none would keep a secret from the others ever again. Rainbow bills and back-stabbings would come between them no more, nor would adverts in the Morning Crier. The island daily, of course, will outlive us all, for the islanders care to know exactly what’s going on and require the inaccuracies of the paper to confirm their private convictions on matters from Parliament to pineapple. (If you were wondering, by the by, Oh’s Parliament never did respond to Killig’s request to purchase Oh’s pineapples. The case was suspended pending the Customs and Excise investigation into the island’s missing crops. By the time Parliament remembered to resume its deliberations, Killig’s blight was gone and the point moot.)

  Cyrus Puymute assumed for himself the General Manager position vacated by Gustave and kept up-and-running the plantation, which Pedro haunted, sharing the odd beer and odder word with Puymute’s pickers. Abigail, after Gustave’s death, restricted her midwifing to the demands of the so-called seedy port girls, dividing her time between them and me (and I got the lion’s share of it, I’m happy to say).

  With Gustave gone, the island’s appetite for magic, if by no means starved, was at first subjected to a stricter diet than usual, for in dying Gustave had wiped the Vilder lineage officially from the island’s plate. Unofficially, I carried on the Vilder line myself for nearly twenty years, with all the whispers and attention and finger-pointing that that entailed. The islanders all assumed I was Gustave’s daughter (and so did I), though none of us knew how this had come to be. I did ask sometimes, my mother, my father, Abigail. They all claimed to know nothing and were quick to respond with worried questions of their own: “But aren’t you happy as you are? Don’t you want to be here with us?” Though I wasn’t always happy being who I was, I did want to be there with my mother and my father, and so to spare them any further discomfort, I finally stopped asking why I was different. Raoul and I never discussed my pale white skin or where I came from. For as long as I can remember, I knew—though I’m not sure how—that this was a subject I could never bring up in his presence.

  Happy as I was otherwise with my grandfather, or with Abigail or my three favorite uncles (Bang, Cougar, and Nat), outside the loving and colorful home that Edda and Wilbur had made for me, my world was black-and-white, and lonely. Or, rather, my world was black, and I was white and lonely. All I ever wanted was to blend in.

  So like Emma Patrice before me, and at about the very same age, I traded island sands for mountain snows in Switzerland, that mysterious land that had once swallowed up my grandmother, land of my childhood fantasies and landscapes as white as my skin. I bought a house with some money that Abigail gave me and made a modest living as a painter, as I told you before.

  But like Mr. Stan Kalpi who awoke one morning dissatisfied with mere mathematics and pork, I began to wonder who I was really. I wasn’t an islander like the others, yet at times I felt like more of one than they could ever be. I must be a Vilder, but what was a Vilder anyway? I was like the polynomials that Mr. Stan Kalpi taught his students at school, a string of unidentified variables that together equaled Almondine Orlean.

  My father would be a variable, and my mother, too, but those were dead ends, for Gustave was dead and Edda, for all her motherly love, had never looked into my eyes and seen that they were red, not black like hers. Then there was Raoul, and Abigail. They were variables, too. They had dodged my questions before, but maybe it was time to insist. I thought maybe I should lock up my small house, take a leave from my colors and canvases, and go back to Oh to attend to my past. An almond couldn’t flower hidden deep in the snow.

  As luck or magic would have it, the moon and the wind had never lost sight of the fruit they left at the mango tree. They had never stopped watching over me, never stopped playing their tricks. So when I could no longer resist the gibbous moon’s shine or the songs and the scents on the meddling breeze, when I finally recognized that I was a mosaic full of holes, wind and moon conspired and dropped a variable at my door. One evening dressed up like any other evening (cold, gray sky; goat cheese and chimney-smoke wafting from next-door Maxim’s), as I packed up my belongings to go back home, my grandmother knocked and asked to buy a painting.

  I knew her at once, for despite her age Emma Patrice bore a striking likeness to my mother Edda, or vice versa, I suppose. Emma Patrice was well preserved, her smooth skin spared all those years of island sun, and she was eager to tell her story to her granddaughter. Emma Patrice hadn’t perished that day on the slopes, she said, hers was escape not demise, not a choice but a pure doing, selfish and selfless both, motivated by the simple island philosophy that “happiness is what life’s all about.” Had Emma Patrice remained on Oh, she said, her island fever would have burned permanent scars into Raoul and baby Edda. For her own sake and theirs, she had to get away. She might have taken her baby with her, Emma Patrice admitted, but then what would have come of poor Raoul all alone?

  You probably don’t understand this kind of reasoning, especially not after seeing how devastating and permanent an effect a missing mother had on poor Edda. But Edda’s loneliness is what saved my life, and because of that and my own escapist tendencies, I subscribed to my grandmother’s belief that one might justify betrayal for the sake of a loved one’s best interests (so had my loved ones done to me my whole life, as I was about to discover). All the same, Emma Patrice was saddened to know of the pain her absence had inflicted on Edda; she had rather hoped my mother would be emboldened by her state, broadened, forced to allow for circumstances that cracked the island’s usual molds.

  Emma Patrice’s theory, a farina philosophy of sorts, panned out, she saw, but with a generation’s delay. I was the bold Orlean, the broadened one. Me with my Vilder mole and white complexion. So bold must I have seemed to Emma Patrice, in fact, that she felt an immediate kinship with me, though of course we were not at all related.

  Like me, perhaps Emma Patrice was more islander than she admitted, for my presence triggered in her an irresistible urge to indulge in island gossip, something I typically avoided, provoking as much of it as I did. Imagine my surprise when Emma Patrice knew more about Oh than I, thanks to the give in that fabric of history and lore with which the islanders inveterately cloaked themselves. Apparently, it stretched over oceans and across continents, unfrayed by blizzard or drought. She even knew she had a red-eyed granddaughter.

  Emma Patrice had a friend on Oh, a friend with a secret. Henrietta Williams was her name. (You might remember she dropped her sugar apples once, laughing at Raoul.) Secrets on Oh—kept secrets—are even harder to come by than those elusive rainbow bills, and their purchasing power far greater. In youth Emma Patrice had had the good fortune to happen upon a secret of Henrietta’s, spotted it like a shiny penny in the sand, she did, and with it years later she bought both information and guaranteed discretion. Henrietta was the only one on Oh to whom Emma Patrice had confided her whereabouts, the only one to be trusted not to reveal them, for Henrietta’s youthful indiscretions had earned interest over the years and that Emma Patrice might splash her secret across the island was a gamble Henrietta couldn’t afford
. (I have yet to coax Henrietta’s crime from my grandmother, but I will one day, rest assured. When the wind is right and our hot chocolate, hot enough.)

  Well, thanks to this mutually profitable arrangement, from a distance Emma Patrice had followed the developments of her abandoned island home, the magic and the mundane, the gossip and the rumor. She knew that Edda was well looked after, knew that Abigail had honored their blood-sister pledge, knew that Edda had given birth to a baby named Almondine. She knew who fell in love, who fell into money, who fell drunk across the threshold of the seedy port bar. Henrietta’s missives spared no islander and no detail.

  Emma Patrice’s only regret, were she forced to admit to one, was that Abigail had never known the truth for sure, never known that Emma Patrice had escaped the island strictures and thrived in the shiny snow, though Emma Patrice was sure Abigail must have guessed it. To tell her outright back then would have been too cruel, to expect her to lie to Edda about her missing mother, too unfair. “Then once Edda was grown,” my grandmother explained, “too much time had gone by.” She was right. Abigail would indeed have considered such a tardy truth an offense.

  Emma Patrice and I talked through the night. She told me about everything from Agustín Boe’s death by snakebite to Ms. Lulu Peacock’s activities by night. When the sun finally rose, I had enough defined variables to fill my suitcase and then some, but the mosaic was still incomplete. I still didn’t know who I was really, and the wind wanted me home, to find out.

  My grandfather Raoul Orlean, on the other hand, had had the good fortune of a well-ordered childhood, his past and his future stretching before and behind him like sharp rainbows spilling from clouds. That’s probably why the story of Stan Kalpi, and the rough and rugged journey on which he embarked, captivated Raoul so, for the sheer contrast they bore, the disorder, when measured against his own predictable and orderly life. In Raoul the tale evoked fear and wonderment. How close Stan Kalpi had come to not knowing who he was! How brave that he should have journeyed so far to find out!

  Raoul, uncertain that I would be as lucky and as courageous as Mr. Stan, and (though he would have been loath to admit it) unwilling to accept unquestioning such pale, red-eyed disorder in his dark-skinned, black-eyed, plain-as-noses-on-faces kind of life, had attempted a similar journey on my behalf. Lineage was a matter of history and pride on Oh; no mingling of roots among family trees could go officially undocumented. As head of the family, Raoul had had to try and see to that. He had worried that one day I would see myself in the mirror and know that I didn’t belong (which is precisely what I did), and that I would ask him where I came from (which I never dared).

  When I went back home again, it wasn’t Raoul to whom I finally turned. I arrived at Oh and pulled the bits and pieces of the story from my bag, and I laid them out before Abigail. She must have wondered how I knew as much as I did, but she never asked me about the variables I brought from Switzerland. She only added to my mosaic those misshapen tiles she had fashioned herself. Although she loved Edda enough to take her secret to the grave, Abigail’s love for me, her rescued almond, was even greater. And so she passed her secret on.

  If I have two fathers in Gustave and Wilbur, my mothers are three: Claudine, Edda, and Abigail, the one to whom I owe my livelihood. She taught me to paint, having had her bit of training in brushes and colors, and she secured my inheritance after Gustave’s death. That night of the sting he had hidden away his money, removed it all from the bank and instructed Pedro to use it to secure his release from jail, should Gustave have been captured by Raoul. Talker that he is, lonely Pedro, he told Abigail where the money was hidden and she swiftly stole it. Years later she gave it to me, saying only that she had saved it on my behalf. Her painting may be rudimentary, but she knows how to balance accounts.

  I have never in turn passed on my secret to Raoul. He remains partial to absolutes, though he seeks them with less rigor these days, and if he thinks that the truth died absolutely with Gustave, then that’s just as well. At least it’s dead and Raoul can relax. No one can know more than he, and he knows all that can be known. Not even Stan Kalpi would pursue a dead end. Raoul has recognized, too, that behind Gustave’s slouch-shouldered legacy there stood a tall man, with broad-shouldered inclinations. For years now I’ve been plain Almondine to Raoul, no more the creature with the red eyes and the skin that isn’t his own. To tell him the tardy truth now would be an offense.

  Our common quest is over, mine and Raoul’s. What missing pieces Emma Patrice and Abigail couldn’t supply, I managed to scrounge on my own. It’s amazing what you can find—and find out—if you know where to dig in the sand and how to listen to the leaves. After defining the variables of the polynomial that is me, I went back to Switzerland to put together my mosaic and to care for my grandmother, who isn’t my grandmother at all. But our escapist tendencies keep us strangely bound. When Emma Patrice is gone, I’m not too sure where I’ll go. Back to Oh perhaps, or maybe to a city where the lights outshine the invisible stars. Wherever I end up, the wind and the moon will find me, and will have a hand in what I do.

  And every now and again, they will insist that I come back home.

  When you leave from Oh, your memories begin to wane, memories of a place—my place—too ephemeral to survive in the concrete world of indifferent winds and pacified moons. In time you will forget your visit entirely. Your verandah with the dancing curtains and smell of gardenia, the chill of the night’s kiss on your sun-baked shoulders, the chirping frogs, and the mangoes in more varieties than you knew existed. It will seem very far away and you will wonder, were you ever really there at all?

  When I leave from Oh, the wind is still. The tourists notice the attention I get from the airport staff and wonder who I am. They assume it’s my scar that makes the islanders stare, think them insensitive or rude. That’s not it. I am proof of the magic of Oh and my departure always leaves the islanders torn. Between fear and relief, between the desire that I stay and preserve the island’s gentle balance, and the desire to be rid of me and what most of them think I represent. Do I belong to the seductive moon? they wonder. Am I capable of casting spells?

  The truth may well be entirely different from what you’re thinking, or different from what the islanders believe. Maybe it lies somewhere in between. Truths get lost as they age. They wrinkle and whither, grow distorted by the filter of the years and the prisms I carry in my pockets. I can never be sure of them.

  I can never be sure of anything. Not the oils on my palette that blend and bleed. Or even my Almondine mosaic, with its chipped and sandy tiles that sometimes come unglued. Like the wind, friends can turn in the space of a breath. Almonds can sprout from mango trees and thrive. Too many pineapples might break your heart, especially when it rains.

  And one windy evening, when the moon is right, a long-lost grandmother-who’s-not-really-a-grandmother could knock on your door, and ask to buy a painting.

  Acknowledgments

  It is impossible to acknowledge all the blessings—the people, the places, the occurrences—that conspired to make this book a book, for they are as many as the pineapples on Oh. They are writing teachers and writer friends, friends who live on islands, and friends who were islands when I needed a sunny shore; they are beaches and rum shacks, coffee bars and yoga classes; stellar alignments (I can only presume) and proverbial bullets dodged. They are little towns on tops of hills, and one very real and bounteous mango tree.

  For their help and their handholding (book-related and otherwise), they are most definitely Priya Balasubramanian, Patricia Gillett, Marie Lamoureux, Dee LeRoy, Kristin Stasiowski, and Kari Winter; for their heart and their artistry, Andrew Bly (cover design) and Patti Schermerhorn (cover art); and for everything, always, my mother, MaryAnn Siciarz.

  I am grateful for all of it; I hope I put the pieces where they were meant to go.

  About the Author

  Stephanie Siciarz was born in the US and is a graduate of Georgetown University
and The Johns Hopkins University. She is a writer and translator and has worked for high-ranking officials in international, government, and academic institutions in the US and Europe. She currently resides in Ohio, where she is on the faculty at Kent State University. Left at the Mango Tree, her first novel, was shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize.