A Simple Distance Read online

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover photograph of woman © Getty Images. The woman in the photograph is a model who is in no way connected with this work.

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2006 K.E. Silva

  ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-11-8

  eISBN: 978-1-61775-269-8

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2006923121

  All rights reserved

  First printing

  Akashic Books

  PO Box 1456

  New York, NY 10009

  [email protected]

  www.akashicbooks.com

  There’s something about an island … It gets in your blood.

  —George Pascal

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  CHAPTER 1

  I was born with quick-growing roots that snuck between my parents and split my family into pieces. As a child I often crept to the top of the staircase that ended just outside my mother’s bedroom. I would curl up against its stained picket railing on the last step before our second-floor landing with a blanket and my copy of The Little Prince, so I could both read and watch her door.

  Whenever I got to the scary part—the chapter on the baobabs—I’d tell myself it’s just a story, the words aren’t real. I’d bend the pages, tear off a small triangle from the corner to assure myself I was in control.

  But by then I knew well I’d been born a bad seed, and I’d get stuck, like a scratched record, on particular pages that, no matter what I said, snuck inside and haunted:

  Now there were some terrible seeds on the planet that was the home of the little prince; and these were the seeds of the baobab.

  The year I started law school, my mom moved back to Baobique. After thirty years in North America, she never stopped calling Baobique home. She’d say it with an air of pride, even superiority, when I was growing up, like having it in her back pocket made her present circumstances bearable. Somewhere else, she was important, had a place more in line with her own image of herself.

  It made me feel like she was better than me because she had that other place I barely knew about, when all I ever had was right where I was.

  When I was little and she didn’t have enough money for groceries, my mom would send me to the market with a list of things to buy and a five-dollar bill. She’d tell me if it wasn’t enough money to let the cashier know she’d pay him next time. Then I’d get to the checkout counter and wouldn’t have enough money. Everyone in line would stare at me and the cashier would stare at me and none of us knew what to do. Sometimes he’d say it was okay and sometimes he’d make me put things back, but it always felt exactly the same no matter what he did.

  Then once I went to the store and only bought the things on the list I knew I could pay for right then. And when I got back to the house and walked up the front steps, the wood exposed under big flakes of paint, white and red; the steps I packed with snow in the winter and made a hill to slide down on my friends’ sleds or on those thick “lawn and garden” brown plastic garbage bags; when I got back, I put the groceries on the table and my mom asked where were the rest, and I just looked right back at her. From then on, she only ever sent me with the five-dollar bill. Told me to just get what we needed.

  She collects $300 every month from Social Security for working three decades in the States, mostly selling men’s clothes at the local department store to our upper-middleclass neighbors, the ones with the sleds and houses whose paint never seemed to flake off like ours, the ones whose parents laid down rules like no building snow ramps on the front steps.

  I tried to cover her once through my medical insurance at work, but my firm said she’d have to be a full dependent. So I only got her supplemental.

  Mostly, I live here detached from my mom and my relatives in Baobique. To this day, I keep them curtained off behind a distance as personal as it is geographical. It was Uncle George who first reached through, grabbed me by the ear, and tugged me back; reminded me I could run but never completely hide from who I really was. A Pascal.

  My Uncle George was sick an entire year before he died. He was only given a few weeks, but he ended up living with his illness much longer than expected. Leave it to him to break one last bell curve on his way out. The extra time took its toll on the people around him—the ones caring for him up at Granny’s those long months. But it gave me a chance to visit him in Baobique—to confront the ghost the island had become to me those years not visiting since college, keeping Baobique tucked away at the back of my closet, not admitting how scared I was to reopen its door.

  When Uncle George got sick, I had to go. And then Baobique just kept happening.

  * * *

  Nearly a year after my visit to see my sick uncle, I got the call from my mom telling me he’d passed. She’d been with George when he died.

  All she spoke of were plums and coconuts. Six a.m. She shouted into the receiver just days after the death of her younger brother: My plums ripen so slowly. Then, bam! Just like that, they’re ready. Have to be picked quick, quick. Otherwise, they’ll fall and go to waste. Only good for compost.

  I held the phone a safe few inches from my ear. Or so I’d thought.

  She worried, I suppose, that like my late uncle, her voice could no longer be heard by the people around her, and she asked me if, after his funeral, I would fly her to Oakland to recuperate from the loss.

  George is dead! George is dead! That’s how people told it to each other on Baobique. There, news travels fast. Here, I found out days later when my mom remembered. A forgotten extension of the family tree.

  I’d tried to call my grandmother the morning I found out. But she was at the Bato courthouse, freshly whitewashed, just across the narrow street from the sea—a wall of gray brick, built when Britain ran regular ships in and out of the deepwater port, the only thing standing between man and nature. The Chief Justice of the Caribbean held a special session to offer her his condolences about Uncle George. I got through to her that evening as she was watching it on television.

  It’s a pity you can’t be here to see how important your uncle was to this island. Every one else is flying in. They’re giving him a state funeral. Just as big as the Prime Minister’s last year. Her tone, more formal than ever; she could have been the Chief Justice himself.

  My uncle, a conservative who had served as the island’s Chief Minister, was buried by the state that week next to his father in our family’s plot behind my mother’s house.

  My mom had hoped the government would offer portable toilets and keep the cars away from her crotons. You never knew where people would walk, or stand, to see such an important man lowered into the earth. She wanted to buy torches, lace them between the small palms lining her drive
for my Uncle George, who’d died in her arms. But—what with the plums ripening and everything—it’d slipped her mind.

  Just after the funeral, I bought my mom her ticket, free on American Airlines for using my credit card so much. Eating out.

  I told her point blank when I gave it to her: Now that you’ve got this ticket, you can’t change it. You’ll have to stick to the plan. I was stern because I knew being nice would come back to me down the road in the form of a problem, a tightly jumbled knot of changed dates and destinations that only I would be able to unravel.

  I cannot think of a single thing I hate more in this world than unraveling my mother’s knots. She’s never been very gentle with mine. When I was little and we lived outside Chicago, in our rundown Victorian, the one the town kept telling us to paint because my mom and I were bringing down the property values in the neighborhood, she would take the comb to my hair in her unyielding hands as if it wasn’t like hers at all, all kinky and twisted and riddled with tangles that yanked at my scalp if not treated with just the tiniest bit of care. So I learned how to braid on my own.

  I was supposed to call her the day before she left. Instead I slept, read a book, rifled through a stack of old letters marked with a stamp by the post office: CHANGE OF ADDRESS REQUESTED. It was overcast in Oakland; a good day to rest.

  The ring from her call burst in my apartment.

  Jean! I’m so glad I caught you. I’ve been trying to reach you since yesterday.

  I lied. Sorry, Mom. I had to buy an air mattress. It took me awhile to find the right type.

  That’s what I want to talk to you about. I need you to change my tickets. I’ve got to visit Aunt Lillian in England.

  Mom, I can’t do that. Your flight leaves tomorrow. It’s too late. I told you when I booked the tickets, they’re non-refundable.

  Well, that’s ridiculous. I’ve got to see Lil. She has a heart condition. Just tell them. I’m sure they’ll make an exception.

  Fine, I lied again, I’ll call the airline.

  CHAPTER 2

  Crisis is never convenient. My mom’s need to leave Baobique after Uncle George’s funeral, to rest from all the care he’d needed—the special food, the midnight cleanings, the patience—coincided almost to the day with what was to be the biggest hearing of my yet undistinguished legal career.

  I think my boss felt he owed me when he assigned me Cynthia’s case. The last case we had worked on together had a number of plaintiffs out of state, entailed a lot of traveling in the rural South, a place with which neither of us had much experience. He was a sort of rising star at our firm: sandyblond hair, Yale law. Just a few years my senior.

  The only advice we got was to make sure, make damn sure, everyone knew we were not a couple. He should expose his wedding band, talk about his wife back home often enough to alleviate any threat of our possible union.

  We played along, let people assume I was his secretary, his helper, not co-counsel; didn’t correct their natural assumptions of what a brown-skinned woman and a white-skinned man should, rightly, have been doing together. It put them at ease, got us the information we wanted, when I pretended to be something I wasn’t.

  Sometimes he’d slip: refer to me as co-counsel. Sometimes I’d slip: stand erect, head high, shoulders relaxed, and walk next to him, instead of the choreographed few steps behind. In the car, rented in his name, he behind the wheel driving to the next destination on our list, I’d take my frustration out on him, snap at him for a wrong turn, a disagreement in strategy, a smoke break; tell him he was slowing us down, imply he was pampered, lazy.

  For stretches of time we’d say nothing, apologizing to each other for things we couldn’t help with small silences. Back at the hotel, I’d slam my feet into my sneakers, yank on my shorts, grab my room key, and run on the treadmill until my legs felt like rubber, until my gasps for breath disrupted the boy at the counter watching MTV.

  It’s fitting, really, when you think about it—me, so grudgingly coming to the aid of my own mother, flying her in after the death of her younger brother—being assigned to represent Cynthia in her child custody case. Cynthia’s ex-lover, Linda, was suing her for joint custody of their daughter. Sadie was four and Linda, her other mother.

  The first time we met, Cynthia, still physically shaken, hands trembling from the recency of the shock, let go our formal roles and told me things more fit for friend than lawyer. She told me how messy things had gotten.

  Linda had moved from their flat but left her things behind: her bed, her couch, the kitchen table. Only took underwear, bras, and extra shoes. She had a thing for shoes. They had to match her socks and belt and the trim of her gay-boy shirts.

  Cynthia’d told her to leave and to take the dog. She’d developed asthma from the dander of an animal in the house.

  At first, I’d tried to refocus the discussion. I told her, Cynthia, I need for you to clarify what you want to achieve from this process.

  But Cynthia wasn’t easily led. I need her to answer for this thing I’m left with. This thing of everything to nothing in a single day, she’d said. That wasn’t what I meant and she knew it but continued anyway. Linda said it had been building for months, her feelings for Cara, but she’d only just realized it now.

  Resigned to Cynthia’s insistence on things emotional, I ceased interrupting. Just listened.

  She told me she loved me a lot. And then she took it back. Said it wasn’t true, ever, and that now she had it with someone else.

  Cynthia had gone through Linda’s photographs from before they met. The ones Linda’d never let her see, in the red box on the highest shelf so only Linda—six feet tall and go-go-gadget arms—could reach. She was a compulsive photographer of social events. Everything to look like a party. Cynthia hated that, so Linda only ever took pictures of Sadie and the dog.

  Cynthia had pulled up a chair—Linda’s, red vinyl from the kitchen table—and brought it down. Dividers the size of index cards, pink and blue, separated the stages of Linda’s life. Three or four past girlfriends. The one that wouldn’t talk to her anymore, who frothed lattes into pictures across the street from their flat, naked from the waist up, at some lake. Linda behind her in the next one, bare as well. Nipples a dull gray from the low contrast of the black-and-white film, and protruding toward each other—almost touching. Lots of kissing with her different girls. Cynthia made me look. She was scared she would vanish altogether because she was nowhere in that box.

  She’s turned off her cell phone to avoid my ring, but I leave messages. I’ve told her she needs to get her things out. I can’t sleep in our bed.

  Linda’s things were to go from the house, leaving it empty.

  The air in my lungs, Jean … Now that the dog’s gone, there’s nothing else inside.

  I had to cut in. What about Sadie? A reminder, not a correction.

  She sighed. And Sadie. Back. Of course, Sadie. Always.

  That was all she needed. Ready, then, to move forward with the real purpose of our discussion.

  At the time, the law on the issue was in a state of flux.

  Later, the day before my mom arrived, I asked Cynthia to stop by my office. A new appellate decision had strengthened her claim considerably. This decision, I told her, will likely mean the difference of sole, instead of joint, custody of your daughter.

  We had been discussing the upcoming hearing. Until this new decision, we’d prepared for a fight, tough but fair. I’d prepared Cynthia for the likelihood of joint custody; the rule that would guide the judge’s decision being the best interests of Sadie.

  But the California Court of Appeal, the court that says what goes until the State Supreme Court says otherwise, had up and changed the game. Second-parent adoption, they said, was no longer valid. Not being the birth mother, Linda suddenly had no rights.

  The court had just handed my client a royal flush. It was as if I’d been given all the answers to the questions on my final exam a week early.

  But that wasn’t
what I’d wanted to do with my life. Harm. To me, it seemed we should still be guided by Sadie’s best interests, set adult feelings aside. I asked just to check, How’s Sadie?

  Cynthia’s long stare out the window was a pretty good indication. That morning she’d pushed Sadie on her bicycle, new with training wheels; feet up, on the handlebars, away from the pedals so they wouldn’t get caught in the revolutions. Sadie’d said to her, Push me so fast I can’t even stand it! Cynthia’s hand on Sadie’s back, she’d pushed the girl faster than was safe because too much had already been denied her child. She couldn’t add to the list.

  Sadie had started to get sick all on her own: ran fevers and took to bed, sweat through the night and soaked her sheets. Cynthia learned her patterns, left fresh night shirts by her pillow in case Sadie wanted to start over in the middle of the night.

  She’s fine until she sees Linda, Cynthia told me. But when they’re together, and then Linda leaves … It’s like reopening a wound. Different every time.

  Days prior, Sadie had sat silently in the front window, curled up into a ball, rocking herself back and forth. Cynthia had pulled the girl to her lap on the couch, and they rocked together, watching the ocean, its disappearing white lines, until sunset. The waves grown taller with winter. Other times, Sadie just screamed and screamed. Screeching at the top of her lungs as Linda drove away. Threw herself against the window, slapping palm to pane.

  What could I say? I said nothing.

  Jean?

  Yes, Cynthia?

  What are we doing to my daughter?

  CHAPTER 3

  My mother called me again the morning she was supposed to leave Baobique, but I didn’t pick up. I cursed the three-hour time difference—her ring waking me before my coffeemaker could ease me into morning the way I preferred. Just before the opening, closing, slamming doors of my next-door neighbor readying and leaving, Procter & Gamble usually anticipated my most basic of needs, had something ready for me like a silent, supportive partner. Programmable, twenty-five dollars secondhand off the Internet: unconditional love. The touch of the spoon against the inside of my mug, the reassuring clink as I stirred in too much sugar, too much cream.