Zach
He didn’t know the world could look like this. Iparei doesn’t resemble anywhere Zach has seen in his fifteen years. It doesn’t look like his Toronto neighbourhood, or even like the few foreign places he has visited—resorts in Cuba, Mexico.
From the window of the tiny nineteen-passenger propeller plane, the island had appeared stripped bare. The fallen trunks of palm trees lay across large bare swaths of land like the pickup sticks that he and Dylan used to play with on rainy weekends at their grandparents’ cottage. But here on the ground, the jungle is a living green wall at the edge of the field that serves as a runway—towering palms entangled in vines, leaves like canopies, a riot of flowers. This place is huge and alive in a way that he can’t quite describe. The way the lake-filled wilderness of Algonquin Park can feel in the middle of the night, when you’ve portaged to a quiet shore and there is only the crackle of campfire and the spread of the Milky Way. It’s unsettling and glorious. Anything could be out there. Anything is possible.
He turns slowly, panning the camera on his phone, before stopping the video and holding his phone up, searching for a signal. To his surprise, it beeps to life, though he isn’t surprised by the series of texts from Chelsea.
Did you make it?
Don’t rmbr how long flight is.
Miss ya, kiss ya.
He thumbs a quick emoji in response before his grandmother steps down from the plane behind him. “Wow,” she says. “Your brother would have loved this, don’t you think?”
It’s such a relief to hear his brother invoked so casually that Zach has to press at the fresh bruise on his ribs to stop himself from laughing. It’s not like he doesn’t love his brother. Doesn’t miss him. Doesn’t wish for him back every fucking day. But his mother flinches whenever Dylan’s name is mentioned, and his father only speaks of Dylan in reverent tones. It’s exhausting.
He sways in the heat and heaviness of the air. He can taste the smells of the plane fuel, of sweet florals and something earthy. What would Dylan say about all of this?
Dylan was a good kid, probably better than Zach will ever be. Kinder, funnier. And mostly he was a good brother. But Jesus, he could be annoying as fuck.
When Zach was in grade one, Dylan would take Zach’s dinky cars or his Star Wars figures, stand at the top of the stairs, and dump them out of their cases, watching the chaos of them spinning out and down the steps, ricocheting around the corner and under the sofa in the living room, where Zach would search them out later. Then Dylan would gather up what he could find and do it again.
“You have to share with your brother, Zach,” his mom said whenever he complained. “Besides, you’re not even home when he plays with them.”
“But they’re mine. Tell him to leave my stuff alone.”
“Let him play with them,” she’d say. “You’ll be sorry when he’s gone.”
She hadn’t meant dead, of course. Still, her words surface in his mind all the time now. You’ll be sorry when he’s gone. It was a curse, a jinx. He should have knocked on wood. Sometimes he wonders, if he had done just one thing differently, then maybe Dylan would still be here. The problem was figuring out which one thing. And when he thinks of all the mean stuff he did to his brother, all the things he’ll never be able to take back, his mind seems to swell and double back on itself, and his skin gets tight across his body and his chest, until it feels as though he might burst open.
He concentrates on the sun beating down on him. There’s not a flicker of breeze. It is hot and sticky and the air here is thicker than on even the most humid day at home. The chop of the plane propeller finally dies, and he tries to make sense of the burble of language around him—some English, some French, maybe the local language—but he can’t discern any meaning. Beyond the babble of noise, he can just hear the wash of the ocean. He lifts his phone and starts filming again.
The airport is a tumble of a one-room building with part of its roof missing, and the runway a strip of packed-down earth that ends abruptly at the ocean, which tosses white foam on shades of blue as far as the eye can see. There is a jumble of luggage on a table in front of the building, though their suitcases, shiny newish hard-shells in five distinct colours, are set together on the ground. Other passengers heave up their own bags—some plastic, others old duffle bags, or even woven baskets—and sling them on their hips or over their shoulders and head off down the single muddy road that leads away from the airport. Most are greeted with great yells and hugs, many with tears as though they haven’t been seen in years. Two pickup trucks wait nearby. A white man waves from one and loads up the bed with people, before driving off up the road in a shower of waves and laughter.
Near the table, now almost empty of luggage, he sees Astrid bent over a cardboard box, her gaze moving back and forth between it and a woman standing beside her.
“What is it?” he asks his sister, kneeling next to her. The earth is warm and damp under his knees.
She looks at him and then to the woman above them, who nods slightly. “A chicken,” Astrid whispers to him, her eyes and smile wide. “He was on the plane. On her lap.” The box leaps a little, a scrabbling sound from inside it, and Zach starts back, while Astrid and the woman giggle. It’s so rare to hear his sister laugh out loud these days. It is a lifting trill, like some kind of birdsong, bright and musical, and it unlocks something in him so that he joins in, then leans close to the box a second time to see if he can get the chicken to scramble about again. When it does, he fakes being scared, and Astrid shrieks louder this time.
“Zach! Astrid!”
He ignores his dad so he can pretend to be scared of what’s in the box one more time. Astrid is already tiring of the game, but still she smiles at him and then presses her face to a hole torn in the box, where she whispers something and then glances up at the woman indulging the two of them.
“Thank you,” Astrid says quietly, before taking off towards their parents.
Left alone with the woman, Zach rises to his feet. He stoops his shoulders a little when he realizes he is taller than her.
“You are the missionary’s family,” she says, and it takes him a second to register her quiet words through her accent. It is not a question.
“Yeah,” he answers, even though he doesn’t feel any connection to the people who are just fading sketches in an old photo album.
The woman considers him closely, as if deciding something, then nods. “God bless you,” she says, picking up her box and walking away.
“Yeah, um…you too. See ya.”
He knows he’s supposed to feel something because his ancestors came here a long time ago. Because they died here. But he doesn’t. Ms. Pal, his guidance counsellor, told him to remember how lucky he was, to get such an amazing opportunity to truly understand his family’s past, his place in it. That he was reckoning with history. But he isn’t sure that anything monumental is happening, or that there will be a reckoning. All he feels is hot and tired.
“Zach, put down the phone,” his dad says.
He grits his teeth and then heads towards his family, who are standing with two men. His parents are closer together than he has seen them in months; they’re still not touching, but at least they’re not pinging away from each other like magnets.
The two men seem younger than his parents. One is more compact than his dad and not much taller than Zach himself, though his muscles are evident through the soccer shirt whose team Dylan would definitely know. Zach is merely happy to recognize it as a soccer shirt. The man’s skin is richly brown, his face lined with concern. He smiles as Zach joins the group, but there is something withheld there—genuine, but also guarded. It is a smile Zach recognizes, has become good at himself.
He has missed the introductions, but the man extends his hand to Zach, even as his mother says, “This is Mr. Tabé, our host.”
“David, please. Welcome,” the man says.
“Yeah, thanks,” Zach says, the words just an empty sound in his mouth.
David waits for them all to settle, then makes eye contact with each of them in turn as he speaks. “Welcome to Iparei,” he says, spreading his hands wide to take in the airport, the people drifting off down the road, the people watching them, the wall of green that seems to hide the rest of the island from sight. “We are very glad you have come.” There is a formality to David’s speech that makes Zach shift uncomfortably.
“Yes, yes! Welcome. God bless you!” says the other man, with a rounder face, a balding head, a wider, easier smile. He is dressed in a bright white button-down that painfully reflects the fierce sun. “I am Robson Kapere, the pastor of our church and our people, and we are so very glad you are here. We have so much work to do together.” He pumps each of their hands more vigorously than David did, and grasps Zach and his dad by the shoulder as he does so.
David waves over a young man who is leaning against the truck. He is a few years older than Zach, and pulls himself up tall as he comes towards them. His hair is a cloud of tight curls, and there is a resemblance between him and David, something about the mouth, the set of his jaw beneath the beginnings of a beard. Zach tries to affect a posture of cool, one that comes so easily at home.
“This is my son,” David explains, “Jacob.”
Jacob smiles a thin smile as he lifts the bags to carry them back to the truck. Zach feels a new wash of embarrassment at the amount of luggage they have brought for their ten-day trip, only five of which they’ll even spend on this island. He slides his phone into his pocket.
Zach sits in the truck bed, leaning against its metal side. It is too loud to talk with the wind and the rotted roar of the muffler. The place seems wild, the greenery impenetrable. Every so often there is a fist-sized shadow hanging between the trees, and he feels rather than knows that they are enormous spiders. After a few minutes, Jacob stands and leans on the front of the cab, where David and Robson, as well as Zach’s mom, grandmother, and sister, sit. As they round a bend, Jacob takes a single step to the side of the truck as the massive bough of a giant tree sweeps across where he was just standing.
Zach wants to laugh, the movement of the truck as it bounces down the dirt road driving anger from his body. He would never be allowed to ride in the back of a truck like this at home. The wind smells of sea and green, the floral perfume so thick he can feel it coat his skin and lungs. Branches whip close to him and he leans back out of the truck to grab at passing leaves. A vine stings his hand as it is pulled through his grip, leaving a red mark the length of his palm. A lifeline, red and angry.
He stumbles to his feet and inches his way towards the front to stand beside Jacob. They aren’t going fast—the road won’t allow it. Still the truck moves unexpectedly, like a living thing trying to buck them off.
There are huge trees up ahead, making a cathedral of the roadway. “What kind of trees are those?” he asks Jacob, for something to say, though he cringes inwardly at having asked such a stupid question. He’s not sure Jacob has heard him, and hopes his words have been carried away by the wind.
Then Jacob glances over at him. “Banyan trees,” he says. “Each village has one at its centre. If you have a pig, a kava root, and a banyan tree, you’ve got everything you need for a party.”
“Amazing,” Zach says, though the word isn’t enough to capture what he is feeling. The banyans seem alive to him in a way no tree ever has before, as though they are more animal than tree. Their leaves make great latticed canopies, and their massive boughs sprout enormous roots reaching for the ground, so that a single tree appears to make an entire forest.
Zach tries to hold himself the way Jacob does, so still and easy. He keeps his joints loose to anticipate changes of direction before they happen, his hips absorbing the movements of the truck. Dylan would be good at this. If he were here, he’d stand in the middle of the truck bed, arms out at his sides, pretending he was flying or surfing, waggling his hips or dancing.
Zach reaches into his back pocket for his phone and starts to film the lashes of green coming at him, sunlight spearing the road through the lace of foliage overhead. But even with the glare on the screen Zach can tell the images aren’t what he wants them to be. It is a blurred smear of colour, a slice of sky so bright it looks white. He begins shooting again, using both hands to steady his phone, squinting hard at it and waiting for the light to fall in columns through the foliage, for a sliver of ocean to be visible through the trees.
He feels Jacob’s hand on his arm, just as the truck drops to the right from beneath him and then slams back up against him. Zach falls hard into the bed of the truck, his phone skittering to the feet of his father, who is reaching towards him and yelling his name.
Before Zach can register what is happening, Jacob is crouched above him, pulling him up to sitting and then leaning him against the side of the truck.
“Jesus, Zach!” His father’s voice is panicked. “What the hell? You’ve got to be more careful!”
His face burns in humiliation. For falling, for the way his father is yelling at him. For everything.
He looks away from his father’s panicked face. Through the back window of the cab, Astrid’s mouth is a worried O. Beside her, his mom has craned around with an expression that transforms from terror to relief. He smiles at her despite the pain in his shoulder, gives a short shrug and rolls his eyes, then puts on his sunglasses again.
The relief on her face hardens, and she glares at him, gestures that he is to stay sitting, then turns away.
He stares at the back of his mom’s head as Jacob motions to Zach’s dad to hand him the phone. Then he sits beside Zach and examines it briefly—the newest model, shiny and still unscarred, even from this drop—before handing it back to him.
“Thanks,” Zach says, sliding the phone into his pocket without checking it.
Jacob nods. “We’re almost there.”
Zach rubs his shoulder where he hit the truck bed, wondering if it will bruise. It still surprises him: what bruises and what doesn’t. It’s not always the thing that hurts the most that leaves a mark.
Eventually, the air shifts and the truck slows, then rocks to a stop and there is the sea—the immense spill of it all the way to a horizon that is farther than anything he has ever seen. There are a few palm trees swaying overhead, and the rustle of wind through vines and leaves. A few buildings of corrugated metal or woven leaves blend into the edge of the bush, and there is a narrow cove of beach surrounded by high craggy black coral, the tide line demarcated with seagrass and detritus. The air tastes thick, the flavour of the ocean. He breathes in deep and holds it in his lungs, like he’s smoking up. It fills him the same way. Then he stands and turns slowly in the bed of the truck to take it all in, even as his father leaps down and Jacob starts to hand down bags to other men who approach. Some reach up to shake hands with Zach. They all shake hands with his mother, his father, his grandmother.
He rubs at his shoulder again, the pain and embarrassment fading. He jumps down from the truck and stumbles some.
Astrid’s eyes are clouded with concern. “Did it hurt?”
“Nah, of course not,” he lies.
Jacob leaps down beside him, using Zach’s shoulder to steady himself. Zach squints against the pain and Jacob squeezes slightly, a reassurance of sorts.
Zach is about to say something when his phone rings. Service! He pulls his phone out but its face is dark. Jacob flips open the phone in his hand and talks quickly as he begins to walk away.
“Where ya goin’?” Zach calls after him.
“Don’t worry,” Jacob replies. “I’ll be back in time to go see your grandparents.”
Zach stands a minute, alone by the truck. A crowd of people has gathered by his family. David is saying something and gesturing with his hands, but the ocean and the wind are in Zach’s ears.
He waits for his mom to turn to him, wills her to, staring hard at her from behind his sunglasses. He keeps waiting.