RipenAshley-Ruth M. Bernier
from Black Cat Weekly
Sometimes I imagine what tourists do with their first few hours after stepping off the plane into paradise. I bet it involves a scenic ride to their hotel or villa, some gasps at the view and no-filter-needed selfies being uploaded to social media; perhaps a sip of something flooded with rum or an ecstatic plunge into the Caribbean Sea. For me, on my visits back home to St. Thomas every couple of months, those first two hours always find me in the same place: at my mother’s insistence, I’ll be ten feet high in whatever fruit tree is currently blooming in her garden, avoiding antisocial iguanas and blighted branches. This visit, it’s mango season. I bet my fellow passengers are ordering daiquiris from the hotel bar. I’m shimmying down a bough a couple fathoms above my mom’s herb garden, trying my best not to get twigs tangled up in my skinny sisterlocks and tossing mangoes down to my mother below. Well. Tossing mangoes and weighted questions.
“Ma,” I try, pulling a particularly sappy fruit from a branch. “Jus’ now, in the car, it seemed like he couldn’t figure out how to turn on the radio. Maybe you and I should—”
“Iss fine, Naomi. It’s a new radio, is all. All deh features in the new car are confusing for both of us,” my mother says. She smiles up at me. “See if you could get those to the top of the tree, love. If the birds ain’ get to dem yet.”
This is what she does best. My mother fills spaces with plants. There’s her garden, of course, but here in the little house on the Northside of St. Thomas where I grew up, there isn’t a windowsill or a bedside table that doesn’t have a tiny aloe or a spindly orchid quietly growing on top of it. There are fruited passiflora vines that wind along her gates and crotons in decorated pots in the corners of rooms. There’s a need somewhere deep inside of her to plug every hole she sees with something green and growing, even if that hole is in the middle of a conversation. Especially when that hole is in the middle of a conversation.
I sigh and take the picker, reaching as high as I can into the mango tree leaves and angling the metal fingers around the dewy fruit ripening up top. “Okay, but then, when it came time to make the turn off St. Peter Mountain Road, I saw that you had to remind him where and when to turn. Into our own—”
“Honey, I know you saw the storm we had las’ week knocked down the Flamboyant tree at the end of the road. You didn’t see how different the turnoff from the road looks? Your father’s still getting used to the new landscape,” she interrupts. “Barely even June, an’ the storms already comin’. You should’ve seen the garden after the one las’ week. It’s a wonder there’s still fruit hangin’ from the tree.”
Oh, there are plenty of things left hanging. Just as I’m getting ready to drop some more—mangoes, and probing questions too—I feel a buzz in my back pocket that, thankfully, has nothing to do with the fat bumblebees that are making their daily rounds through the leaves. I wrap one arm around the thick bough and ease my phone out of my pocket.
“Yuh pickin’ fruit, love? Or you on your phone?” Ma calls up to me.
“It’s Mateo,” I answer.
“Oh,” she says. She’s trying her best to sound nonchalant, but I can see the look on her face clearly, even from twelve feet up—excitement, and perhaps a bit of relief, that this beautiful thing growing between my former classmate Mateo and me over the past six months hasn’t been wilted by distance and time since I was last on island. “He’s good? He on his way up?”
The texts are buzzing in furiously. You here? Meet me at Brewers when you can. Please, Nay. You need to be here. Won’t believe what’s happened, they say.
“I think I’m on my way down,” I say instead. “Teo’s working. He’s asking me to meet him at Brewers Bay. Something’s going on down there.”
“Lord. Well, take the car. Bring him some mangoes too,” she says as I shimmy down the tree. She’s got a bucketful ready for me by the time I’m back on solid ground and dusted off appropriately. “Tell him not to wait too long with these. Too much time, and things spoil. He might want to keep that in mind.” A pause. “You both might.”
“Right, Ma.” I decide to meet her thinly veiled insinuations with some of my own. “There are other things that probably shouldn’t wait for too much longer, either. We still need to talk. About Daddy and his—”
“Right,” she echoes, cutting me off. She links her arm through mine, and I’m struck by the matching tones of our skin, like polished mahogany, as she rubs some sap off of the back of my hand. “Oh! Before I forget. Look for some Flamboyant flowers while you’re down there, please? I like to keep a bunch in my vases, and since the tree down the street is gone see if you could find some for me, love.”
All I can do is stare—at the bucket of mangoes by her feet, at the pleading behind the smile on her face.
“We’ll have plenty of time to talk later,” she assures me. “Go on down to Brewers. And don’t forget meh flowers, eh?”
I mutter my own reassurances to her while I pile the mangoes into a bag. Mateo and I have both been looking forward to my visit for weeks, but his texts are never filled with this level of urgency, and he almost never sends them when he’s on a shift. I wonder what this is about—and why he would think that whatever’s happened down on the bay would require the services of a food journalist like me.
But, hey. At least for once, in my first hours back, I get to go to the beach.
I note as I drive down the hill to Brewers that finding Flamboyant flowers for my mother won’t be a problem at all. The hillsides look like Christmas trees—rich greens dotted with spots of vibrant red. When I was little, my father told me the story of two Virgin Islanders decades before, flying over the St. Thomian hills in a tiny airplane and scattering hundreds of Flamboyant seeds across the island. I loved the idea of them tossing out seeds they’d probably never get to see grow
entirely, leaving those gifts for those who’ll come afterward. I loved the idea of a plant being a legacy.
Brewers Bay is lit up with an entirely different color. Both lanes are filled with blue police Chevys, most of which are flashing their neon lights. Officers and EMTs like Mateo fill the beach, talking into their radios and milling around on the sand. There’s a group of them hovered down at the water’s edge, crowded around a rescue boat. Their deep blue uniforms are a soft contrast against the aquamarine water, and their very presence—and all the reasons that could be behind it—a sharper contrast against the waves and white sand.
I pull my parents’ Explorer against the curb, making sure not to scratch or smudge Daddy’s new tires, and look out over the shoreline. There must be at least twenty first responders on the beach, as well as a sizable crowd of onlookers and—I’m noticing cameras on tripods and audio equipment, so these must be my people: press. There’s a police officer keeping the civilian crowd closer to the road, away from the rescue boat anchored close to the shore. Mateo was right, this certainly is something. I’m starving, and it takes everything in me to ignore the bunches of fuzzy sea grapes growing along the edges of the beach and make my way down toward the crowd on the sand. I’m halfway there when I hear someone calling my name.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen Coziah Hodge, but she’s only become more unmistakable than ever. In the decade since I interned at her fledgling online newspaper, she’s doubled in size, cut off all but three inches of her hair and dyed it a deep red, and traded in her contacts for wide frames the same color as her hair. Her newspaper’s grown too. Back when I’d interned for her the summer before I’d left for college, she was struggling to get reporters, to get interviews; to get readers to check out her page. Now the Conchshell Chronicle boasts thousands of readers—with paid subscriptions—from all over the islands and the world. She walks up from the crowd and greets me with a hug that feels as soft and giving as the mangoes in my mother’s tree. Yeah, Cozi’s presence has grown plenty, but to me, she’ll always be the person who welcomed a curious seventeen-year-old into her one-room “office” in the back of her sister’s nail salon and gave all the advice and experience she could. Like those two men on the plane—scattering seeds for later.
“Nay-Nay! Wait, you been on island an’ you ain’ call me?” she greets me.
“Meh plane jus’ land, Cozi. Not even three hours ago.”
A healthy guffaw. “An’ you already down here? Already found the action? Look you!”
“What can I say? I only learn from the best.”
“Well, I only teach the best, okay, love?” She takes a step back and grins at me. “I’ve been watching your show on EAT TV, Naomi. Oh, I love it so much. The interviews are truly something.”
“Easy to ask questions when we’re talking about food and drinks and seasoning.”
“Yes, but you always ask the right ones. I really did teach you well.” The smile
fades. “Seriously, though. Were you jus’ driving by and got curious? Or did you hear about what’s happening down here?”
“Mateo called me. I . . . don’t know if I’ve told you how close he and I have grown in the past few months . . .”
“You haven’t,” Cozi says. Her words are straightforward, but there’s a question in her voice and a sparkle in her eyes.
“Yeah. I . . . well, I’m down here to see him, and to deal with some other things with my parents. Mateo’s an EMT. He texted me to come here to Brewers, but he didn’t give me any details, Cozi. What is all this?”
Coziah exhales slowly, then links her arm through mine and begins to walk us toward the crowd. “Li’l background. I assume you know about the storm last week.”
“Yeah, Tropical Storm Blaine, right?”
“Yup. Formed right over us. It was just a barely organized tropical depression until—bam, just like that, it’s a named storm with a little eye and all. This all happened within five hours of it hitting us. No one was prepared. ’S a blessing it wasn’t any worse.”
“Same thing my parents said. They hadn’t boarded up or anything. They had trees down and some flooding in the back, but it could’ve been a lot worse. My . . . uh, Mateo; he worked for like, three days straight.”
“So, he’s ‘my Mateo’? Well, sah! We gon’ circle back to he, okay?” Cozi says suggestively as we walk. “Lemme finish telling you about this here. About a day after the storm passed, some people cleaning up Lindbergh Bay found a small fishing boat that drifted in from the sea. Flipped over, no one inside. Police checked out the boat’s registration number and they learned the boat’s owner was Lewiston ‘Lucky’ Simons.” She spits out the name like a bitter piece of fruit. “Lord. Ah sorry. Senator Lewiston ‘Lucky’ Simons.”
My eyes are already rolling. “Um. Former senator Lewiston ‘Lucky’ Simons. Unless I missed something.”
“You didn’t. ‘Former’ is right. Not to hear him tell it, though. Talking to him, it’s clear he thinks he never left. And by ‘left,’ I mean ‘got thoroughly rejected by hundreds of voters.’ He came in like—tenth in the last two election cycles. You’ve met him before, right?”
I have. It’s an experience I still regret. I’d first met him when he still went by Lewiston “De Sign Man” Simons and his biggest claim to fame was running a sign shop in town on one of the narrow streets behind the Market Square pavilion. Daddy took me with him there once when I was fourteen, when he was trying to order some colorful business cards and a car decal for his tour and sightseeing service. “De Sign Man” had originally charged one price, but after catching a glimpse of Daddy’s tricked-out, brand-new tour van, an extra two hundred dollars got added to the final bill—something he’d tried to pass off as a typo due to “slippery fingers.”
Once Daddy threatened to use his own slippery fingers to call the Department of Consumer Affairs, the charge was taken off. The sleaze associated with him in our minds remained. Seemed like everyone on island had a story like that about “De Sign Man”—but then, about two years after Daddy and I walked into his shop, the man got struck by lightning and survived. He was playing golf on St. Croix and didn’t clear the course quickly enough. I’d seen it as kind of a divine indictment, but other people saw it as a sign of strength; of him being “chosen” or something like that. Man changed his nickname to “Lucky” and served—poorly—as a senator for years.
“Unfortunately,” is all I say to Coziah. “Shit. Did he drown out there at sea?”
“Well, he wasn’t at his shop or his home. His girlfriend said she hadn’t seen him since the day of the storm. Then a couple of fishermen said they saw him launch in Frenchtown the same day the storm hit. Coast guard’s been searching for him for five days now. First as a rescue, then they started to hint that it might wind up being a recovery. So, when we got the call to come down here—”
“You’re thinking they found him. His body.”
“We don’t know what they found. But with a presence this big, what else could it be?” Coziah flashes her Press badge at the cop standing between the crowd and the action down at the shoreline, and casually walks me to the front of the group. “Look behind us,” Cozi whispers. “Bunch of them are wearing his campaign T-shirts.”
There’s another police officer, big guy sweating his light blue uniform shirt a couple shades darker, making his way up the sand toward us—so the glance I take behind me is quick. Cozi is right. Besides the ten or so who are obviously reporters, most people in the crowd are wearing gray shirts with “Time to get LUCKY! . . . into the Senate” printed across the back in bright green letters. It takes everything in me not to roll my eyes, not when so many of them look distraught.
“Ahem. Can I get everyone’s attention?” the officer calls out. The low chatter stops, and several microphones and cameras click on. “Some of you done know—ah, already know I’m Lieutenant Emery Oliver. I’ve been authorized to speak to you all about the events that transpired here today.”
The lieutenant looks like he’s trying his best to balance formal speaking in front of the cameras with the desire to hurl every expletive he can think of at the heat and the sand. He takes a moment to mop his brow with a handkerchief that already looks soaked and continues. “Ah. Okay. So, this morning, ’round five A.M., the pilot of a plane delivering newspapers from St. Croix noticed something unusual on Saba Island as she was flying over it to our airport. She made an official call to the—”
“’Scuse me, can I interrupt?” An older guy with blondish hair calls out from behind Coziah. “Nolan Kirby, Daily News. Why was a plane leaving St. Croix flying all the way over Saba to get to St. Thomas? Isn’t the island of Saba a good three, four hours eastward by ferry, over by St. Eustatius and St. Barth's?"
Lieutenant Oliver sucks his teeth and gives Nolan Kirby an especially nasty stare for keeping him in the heat for an extra ten seconds. “You ain’ been here long, eh? Clearly you don’t know—” He seems to remember the cameras in the middle of his sentence and tries again with a sheepish smile. “Apologies. As a—a clarification, I’m not referring to Saba, Dutch Caribbean; I’m talking about Saba Island, one of deh—ah, deh cays out there that we can see far out in the distance from the shore. It’s the bigger one. The one to the west.” He gestures to the peaks way out on the horizon, two of the tiny uninhabited islands that surround the West End. “The pilot thought that there may be a person in distress on the cay. The coast guard and VIPD jointly deployed two rescue boats. In the early morning light, one of the rescue boats struck some low-lying rocks. Three EMTs were thrown into the water.”
A murmur goes through the crowd like a breeze through leaves. Lieutenant Oliver takes the opportunity to run the dripping kerchief over his face again, and then continues. “More rescue teams were deployed. In the end, one person was rescued from the shoreline of Saba Island. That individual is former senator Lewiston Simons.”
The screams begin before Lieutenant Oliver finishes saying the name. “Praise GOD!” someone yells, and there’s applause and happy wailing behind me. They’re all reacting somehow, even the reporters are scribbling on pads or talking hurriedly into their recorders, and in the middle of that is when I finally see Mateo.
He’s ten yards behind Lieutenant Oliver with a group of other EMTs. They’re all standing close together, listening to the officer as intently as the rest of us are, but it’s their posture—it’s Mateo’s posture—that hits me hard. He’s always been sturdy, as long as I’ve known him—firm and rooted and upright, with a crown of wild curls grafted from his Trini Indian father and Crucian mother. But right now, he looks like my mother’s plants when they haven’t been watered nearly enough. They all do. They aren’t cheering with the rest of the crowd. I think that’s why I call out to Lieutenant Oliver. I think that’s how I know there’s more to the story.
“Excuse me—Lieutenant?” I shout. Cozi turns to me, confused, and I grab her hand. “Naomi Sinclair, for—um—special reporter for the Conchshell Chronicle. Sir, can you please elaborate on the condition of the three EMTs who fell off the rescue boat?”
“Good one, Nay,” Cozi whispers as the crowd quiets down.
Lieutenant Oliver lets out a long breath. “I’m not authorized to give too much detail about that at this point. But. I can share that the rescue fleets were able to rescue two of the EMTs thrown from the boat. Um. We . . . jus’ learned—not even fifteen minutes ago now—we jus’ learned that the third
individual, uh, unfortunately expired despite the best efforts of the emergency personnel. And it’s always rough when we lose someone, you know, in the line of duty. We’re, uh, we gon’ be dealing with that. Overall, though, the goal of the rescue mission was a success. Like I said, we brought Mr. Simons back.”
“Cory Venzen, Channel 5 News. Can you tell us more about Senator Simons’s condition?” a voice yells out from behind me, as if he didn’t hear the first part of the lieutenant’s statement.
“Is Lucky okay?” screeches one of the supporters.
Lieutenant Oliver doesn’t get a chance to respond. He opens his mouth, but before he’s able to say anything, applause and whoops ring out from the crowd. I immediately see the reason why. Limping up the sand from the rescue boat, holding on to a stocky police officer for support but grinning triumphantly, is former senator Lucky Simons.
I’ve always thought that Lewiston Simons looked more like a skinny circus clown than a statesman. He’s awkwardly bony and has a hairline that pulls back more than the waves at low tide. The years haven’t exactly been kind to his mismatched features and the hair he still has left, which is decidedly more salt than pepper at this point. But he’s grinning like he’s expecting his face on headline news and the front page—which, at this point, might not be such a wild expectation. Lieutenant Oliver steps back and grins.
“Perhaps, uh, Senator Simons can tell you heself,” the lieutenant says, clapping a little as his colleague helps Lucky to the central spot in front of the crowd.
“Nuttin’ could stop you, Lucky!” a man in the crowd bellows, which starts another round of cheering and whistling. Coziah mutters something ugly under her breath.
“Thank you, thank all of you for being here for me today,” Lucky Simons addresses the crowd. His voice is raspy, but I sense that the energy in the crowd is powering the electricity that crackles through it. “I . . . was blown off course during Tropical Storm Blaine las’ week when I went out fishin’. Wound up spendin’ some time out there on . . . on Saba. Thanks to the determination of our first responders, I’m here today. ’S a shame about the one young man, deh . . . EMT; may he res’ in peace. His bravery won’t be forgotten. As fuh me, I’m a li’l dehydrated an’ all, but I spent my fair share of time in the bush as a child. Lots of time outdoors. I was able to keep mehself fed from some of the local flora that—”
“HER bravery,” a voice cuts him off. I look off to Lucky’s right, and my eyes go wide. It’s Mateo. He’s walked away from the rest of the EMTs to address the former senator. His face is twisted like an angry vine. “The EMT that died today on your rescue mission,
she was a woman. HER rest. HER peace. An’ she had a name too, sir. It was—”
“Teo!” I call out. I step away from Coziah and the rest of the crowd and run across the sand to him. “Mateo, you can’t—you need to stop now, love. Please—”
“I understan’ you’re upset, son,” Lucky Simons says to the crowd as I slip my arm around Mateo’s waist.
“Naomi.” Mateo’s voice is quiet, but his words are hot. “He has to know. He’s talking about her like she’s—like her life was just a necessary sacrifice for him to be here today. He has no idea who she was.”
“He doesn’t. He has no clue,” I whisper back. “But you can’t say her name, love; not here, not now. Not in front of the cameras. Her family probably doesn’t even know yet, Teo. Please, just walk away with me, okay?”
He runs a hand over his face and lets out a long breath. “Okay. Yeah. Let’s—I can’t listen to this anymore. I can’t stay here. I need to—”
“We’re walking,” I cut him off, pulling him away from the crowd in the direction of the quiet end of the beach.
“Let’s give a hand to that young man; the lieutenant says his name is Matthew Ramakumar—ah, Mattoo Ramkyumar—an’ to all of our hardworking first responders,” Lucky Simons’s nauseating voice rings out behind me.
And they do. They clap for Mateo and for all the other uniformed helpers on the beach. I doubt Teo hears any of it. I hold him tight as we walk away. I let him cover his face and sob. It makes me think, as we walk away from the circus behind us, about how these past few months with Mateo have been all toasts and twilight. They’ve been dancing and dinners when we’re together and hours-long phone and video calls when we’re not. Surprise visits. Jokes. Gifts in the mail. There’s been nothing like . . . this. And I think about how wonderfully things can sprout and grow when there’s abundant sunshine, but how it’s the rain that makes them bloom.
In the end, we drive. We get in Daddy’s new car and leave the beach behind. Twenty minutes later and with half the island between us and Brewers, we finally stop under the enormous Flamboyant tree at the Drake’s Seat overlook, which is blooming in all its crimson glory. The full red flowers mean we can barely see the expanse of Magens Bay and the Atlantic way out beyond us, but that’s okay. It’s fine. I gather flowers for my mother while Mateo gathers his composure. And when he’s ready and my arms are full of foliage, he and I talk about Consuelo Rivera. ...
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