by Nadia Aguiar
“We don’t know that for sure yet,” said her father. “We’re going to have to wait until we can talk to him.” But he looked pained.
“Maybe we need to find Dr. Izquierdo—maybe he knows something that can help stop the Red Coral Project,” murmured Maya. But it wasn’t clear to her—was Dr. Izquierdo the savior of the Pamela Jane that he seemed to be in the journal, or was he now in league with the Red Coral Project and others who didn’t have Tamarind’s best interests at heart? Would he want to take the Pamela Jane away from them?
The mysteries surrounding Helix remained unsolved, too. What was the connection between the identical red seals in the logbook and in Helix’s letter? And what had Isabella meant when she said that Seagrape had belonged to one of the Dark Women? They may never know.
They sat there quietly thinking as the Pamela Jane plowed briskly through the sea and the sun shone warmly on the deck.
“There’s something else,” said Simon, turning to his father. He had just remembered something important. “You knew things about Greater Tamarind. You told us stories about it. You never told us what it was called, but the magical island in your stories was Greater Tamarind.”
Their father smiled.
“We didn’t know about it. It was just an old story your grandmother used to tell me when I was your age,” said their father.
“Granny Pearl?” asked Simon. “What does she know about Tamarind?”
“I’d like to know that myself,” said their father.
Soon after that, the conversation drifted to the problem of containing a fast-crawling baby on the deck of the boat.
Maya had many other things besides the Red Coral Project to think about.
As miles of ocean slid beneath the Pamela Jane, putting Greater Tamarind farther and farther behind them, she suddenly felt a pang in her heart and she missed the island. She remembered Bongo and Netti. Had they made their way back to the Cloud Forest Village? Would she ever see them again? And what would happen to Valerie Volcano, poor, sad Valerie, hiding high in the trees! For a moment Maya imagined she could smell the sweet scent of orchids and she was transported back to the lacy green light in the heights of the cloud forest, and she could imagine the nights when the jungle fireflies lit the jungle with a thousand sparks of colored lights. Maya wondered what had become of all the children who had escaped Evondra in the flood. Had they all found their way home? Maya hoped so.
She thought of Mathilde, dear Mathilde, with the crackle of soap bubbles in her washtub and the ancient tortoise that sat in the corner. Maya missed Port Town, with the blinding flash of sun off the tin roofs and the stray goats and dogs and children that wandered freely through its crooked streets. She closed her eyes and could see the rabble of the pirates and fishermen down on the docks, and then she remembered the air in the evenings, when the clouds came down from the jungle as the earth cooled.
Maya thought of Isabella, driving each day to the orphanage on the outskirts of Maracairol. Feisty Isabella! Maya had almost forgiven her betrayal—she knew it was not made without regret. Would all the soldiers return home? Would Isabella’s brother come home safely? Would the Peaceful Revolution truly change life in Greater Tamarind? Maya pictured the only blue house in Bembao and Gloria and Lorenz—would everything work out for them? And there was the high mountain road and the icy pool where she had swum with Helix. Would she ever walk that road again? An ache in her heart, Maya missed it all.
She thought of how she had been before the journey: agitated, unhappy, frustrated about being trapped on the Pamela Jane. Everything was different now. She had felt and experienced more things than the old Maya could have even imagined. The things she had wished for so much—to be on land, to find friends—had happened, just not in a way she could have ever foreseen. She turned to look at the fast blue water rushing past, each moment bearing them farther away from Greater Tamarind. The smell of cooking filtered up from the galley and on the main deck Helix was talking to their father.
Maya thought of Dr. Limmermor and Valerie Volcano and Kate—there must be others like them, who had stumbled into Tamarind over the years. How did some people get there when most people never could? And what would happen if the Red Coral Project found Tamarind? It would all change. Tamarind as it was now would be lost. The thought made her deeply sad.
Simon came up from the cabin and sat near her on the foredeck.
“Will we ever go back?” he asked after a while.
Maya thought.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But it isn’t someplace that you can find again easily. I don’t know how we would go back.”
They were quiet for a while, the water rushing over the hull as the Pamela Jane sliced through the ocean toward home. evening arrived more gradually now, as they got farther away from the equator.
The following afternoon, Maya was the first to see the green curve of an island rising out of nowhere. The sea was changing beneath them. The bottomless blue was lightening, and then suddenly they came in over the reefs, and the patterns of green and turquoise, the brilliantly colored shoals of fish, and the swift flash of a barracuda took Maya’s breath away. And then Bermuda came into view, with its palm trees and pink beaches and the white limestone roofs of its beloved pastel houses. The Pamela Jane sailed the length of the island and through an inlet, all the way up to a bobbing orange buoy where Maya’s parents furled the sails and dropped anchor and they all piled into the rowboat to row to shore.
On land, Maya dashed across the lawn in the last light, red land crabs scuttling out of her way, and up the stairs to the porch of Granny Pearl’s house and through the screen door.
Granny Pearl was standing in the kitchen washing potatoes from her garden. A big smile broke out over her face, and she reached for a dish towel to wipe off her hands as Maya ran toward her. Maya fell into her grandmother’s soft, ample arms and buried her face in her shoulder and smelled the sun in her house dress, bleached from the clothesline. “Well, here you are finally,” she heard Granny Pearl saying, but then Maya closed her eyes and just held on tightly to her and let all the clatter and voices of the others fade out as they came into the house behind her. She concentrated on the feeling of the ground beneath her feet.
“I’ll never leave solid land again,” she murmured.
“What’s that, love?” her grandmother asked, steering her to a chair at the table.
It took all evening and into the night to tell Granny Pearl about their adventures, much longer than it would have if they hadn’t all kept interrupting one another and stopping to tell all the details and correcting one another and adding more details and shouting, “Remember the . . .” Somewhere during the long tale, Granny Pearl made a large dinner, which they all sat down to eat. Maya and Simon had to be reminded to keep eating since otherwise they held their forks with food speared on them and just kept talking. There was so much to tell. And Granny Pearl never raised an eyebrow. In fact, she seemed to accept all parts of their story—even the fantastical, incredible parts that Maya had felt sure that no one who hadn’t been there would have believed. She listened with a small smile on her face and tapped their plates gently when they had paused too long between bites. And when they asked her how she had known the stories about Tamarind that she had told their father, she gave a tiny shrug and replied simply that they were just old sailors’ stories she had heard many years ago. Cocking her head and gazing seriously at her grandmother, Maya had to wonder if she was telling the whole truth.
In the end Simon fell asleep at the dinner table, and Papi carried him off to bed. Maya could barely keep her eyes open and when her mother said that perhaps she should be off to bed, too, Maya nodded and excused herself. Granny Pearl came in to tuck her in.
“Well, my Maya,” she said. “You had your adventure.”
Maya nodded. Sleep tugged at her.
“Life should always be an adventure,” Granny Pearl said softly. She stroked Maya’s hair back from her face. “When it stops being
an adventure, something is wrong. Remember that.”
Maya wanted to talk, but when she opened her mouth, Granny Pearl put her fingers over her lips.
“Now you sleep, my love,” she whispered.
When her grandmother kissed her and tiptoed out of the room, Maya lay in the little cot and forced herself to stay awake for a while to appreciate everything. She could hear the low hum of her parents’ voices from the kitchen, where they were still talking to Granny Pearl. Penny was asleep in the crib in the corner, breathing deeply, her fingers twitching every now and then. A cricket landed on the edge of the crib for a moment, then clicked free and leaped into the darkness. In the next room Maya knew that Simon was asleep. She felt like the world was swaying, as if she was still on the boat. She propped herself up on her elbow for a moment to look out the window. Helix was sitting on the porch railing, looking out to where the dark ocean turned in the night. Moonlight shone on his back and she heard as he slapped a mosquito from his arm. Helix will be restless for a while until he gets used to things, she thought. But that’s okay.
Maya had almost fallen asleep when a thought broke through the soft layers of sleep and brought her back to the surface, her heart racing. Somewhere in the night were Dr. Fitzsimmons and Dr. Izquierdo and countless faceless people involved with the Red Coral Project, all trying to get to Tamarind. Maya knew that they hadn’t seen the last of them. They would find them. But the thought dissolved back into her mind and her fear subsided. They wouldn’t find them tonight. Sleep crept into her mind again, softening the edges of everything, and she fell back against the pillow and closed her eyes. The room still felt as though it was rocking.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the many people who helped to bring Tamarind to life:
Kirsten Denker, Julia Holmes, Lisa Madden, and Lana Zinck, wise readers and tireless friends, whose faith in Maya, Simon, and Penny sustained the children on their journey.
Lexy Bloom, Anastacia Cavalcanti Junqueira-DeGarcia, Tara Gallagher, the Hederman family, Michelle Hudson, Eric Tyler Lindvall, Kelly Mendonca, Chris Parris-Lamb, and Nathaniel Rich, for their generosity and support on many fronts.
Patricia Hoffman, who let me skip math class in seventh grade and escape to the library to write stories, and who has been my great friend and mentor ever since. I hope that every young person who reads this book will have such a teacher.
It has been my privilege to work with talented and lovely people: my agents, Sarah Burnes and Caspian Dennis; Courtney Hammer; Jean Feiwel; the teams at Feiwel and Friends and at Puffin; and my extraordinary editor, Amanda Punter.
And with love and thanks to my mother, namer of the Pamela Jane and chef to hungry authors, and my father, who has made everything in my life possible, and without whom Tamarind wouldn’t be.
