Three months on from the greatest loss of her seventeen-year life, Plum stood at the Donald Sangster International Airport in Montego Bay thinking of herself as a failed hunter who set her traps and caught nothing. She contemplated two things: the early Christmas travelers surrounded by their island carvings, straw baskets, and rum; and her own empty hands. In truth, Jamaica was Plum’s trap, sort of, a trap she fell into when her parents reengineered her life without her knowing it and sent her away as if she hadn’t mattered at all. In one simple act, her parents nipped their teenage daughter’s behavior before it got out of hand, before she morphed into an uncontrollable teen headed for juvenile prison or an otherwise derailed youth. They acted swiftly, decisively, and without warning. Like training a bonsai plant, containing it before it followed its willful nature. Like clipping the wings of a bird to prevent it from escaping its cage and flying away.
Plum flew to Jamaica, her parents’ island home with which they had a complicated relationship. Her parents loved the island but refused to live on it. Instead, they adopted Brooklyn but talked constantly of going back home to live out the last of their days, extolling the ease of island living, yet visiting and, while there, talking incessantly of the ease of things in Brooklyn—customer service and banking and shopping and dealing with government bureaucracies. They visited and talked of getting away from the family and friends who acted as though living in America meant her parents could bankroll their lives. And it was the place they held up for wayward children, as in: “You children born in America have life too easy. You don’t appreciate what you have. You think when I was your age I could waste food like that. Sometimes all we had to eat was dumpling and butter, what we call slip and slide. And you here throwing away the chicken because you want a hotdog.” And it was indeed the place where misbehaving children were sometimes sent as a last resort by parents frustrated with the negative influences in and around Brooklyn schools, and fearful that a disrespectful child would report abuse if punished.
That was Plum’s fate. What contributed to her ouster from Brooklyn was the actions of Sandy, her close confidante and constant companion, who happened to be at a basement party raided by police for suspicion of drugs. Plum’s guilt was purely that of association, but her parents feared what could have been and acted upon the long-established threat they held up to their wayward child. Except they kept the plan secret from Plum.
Plum packed just the ordinary things: the obligatory gifts—soap, deodorant, perfume, plastic sandals, cheap plastic watches—along with the packaged breakfast foods that she sometimes preferred over Jamaican breakfasts of boiled ground provisions and ackee and salt fish, and callaloo and salt fish. All of that came before that flight out, before her parents clipped her wings, or in the midst of it, when Plum didn’t yet know the details of her parents’ plan, when Plum hadn’t yet begun to hate her parents for shipping her away without warning. And she left the precious things to which she soon expected to return: a locked diary beneath her pillow; a gold necklace with her name; a set of Cabbage Patch dolls she had outgrown but which remained on her dresser and shelves, a reminder of childhood years not very far behind.
Beneath the plane, the sea shimmered, the water black, then blue-black, then blue, the dots of life on the island finally emerging as houses and hotels and vehicles and the sprawling airport. Her aunt and cousins met them there and they loaded the suitcases—four—into the back of a pickup truck. Plum and the cousins climbed in too, Plum looking up and eying the clouds, her aunt reassuring her that the sky had been overcast all day and no rain had yet come.
“Before you know it, we reach home.”
From the back of the van, Plum saw the towns in reverse, Rosehall, Greenwood, Falmouth, Duncans, Rio Bueno and on to Discovery Bay. Her aunt’s home was a four-bedroom house in Lakeside Park with a wrap-around verandah and a winding staircase that led up to the flat roof with a view of the sea and boats at a distance. The beach itself was just a five-minute walk. But in the week her mother was there, she never once felt the water. Instead, they went to other places, an old school on a hill, for one, which in summer months looked like an abandoned campus best suited as the setting for the kind of movie where the dead come back to life. Her aunt and mother disappeared inside an office, and from the verandah that wrapped around the building, Plum looked down on the mix of old and new buildings, a school unlike any she had ever seen. And then they were off to a dressmaker for Plum to be fitted for new clothes. “Just in case,” her mother said, “you grow out of what you brought.” In six weeks? Yet Plum had not been paying attention. When Plum thought back on it, it was too late. Her mother was back in Brooklyn, back in the brownstone near Prospect Park, calling with the unexpected news. She pictured her mother at the dining table, facing the kitchen, ready to run in to turn over frying meat or stir a boiling pot. “You enjoying yourself?”
“Yes, Mom.”
“Well, listen, your father and I have arranged for you to stay and finish high school there.”
“What?”
“Yes. That school upon the hill we went to? Remember it? That’s your new school.”
“But you said it was just for the summer.”
“You can come home for Christmas. If you behave.”
“You lied. You tricked me and you lied.”
“It’s for the best, Plum. Too many things here to distract you. And the last thing your father and I want to see is you in juvenile prison.” A single phone call and her mother had removed any chance of her flying away, getting into the kinds of trouble teenagers always found.
And yet, tucked away in a strict boarding school for girls, she met him, her distraction—first as a tutor arranged by her aunt, and second as a chemistry lab assistant filling in for another teacher on leave—and regenerated wings. Her Mr. Barrett in school. Her Lenworth in private.
From the air, Plum looked down on a long, narrow strip of sand between the ocean and a mixture of squat and tall buildings. With modern civilization pushed so close up against the sand, Florida’s seaside towns had little room to spread when hurricane-force winds pushed the waves high and strong up against the shore. It wasn’t much different from Jamaica’s seaside resort towns, where rambling villas were giving way to more and more high-rise hotels and resort communities butted up against the sea. The hills outside Montego Bay sprouted ever-larger houses, and along the coast so much space seemed to be set aside for visitors rather than those who inhabited the island. But the teenage Plum had paid little attention to all of that, reveling in her moments on the sand and in the azure waters, grateful for her little bit of freedom.
Plum changed planes in Miami and then she was airborne again, looking down on red roofs, white buildings, flamingo-pink houses, deep blue pools and murky canals. The houses were like perfectly spaced Lego blocks with little to distinguish them from a distance. The differences between Miami’s planned housing and the island she had just left were stark. In Jamaica, buildings sprouted at random, and especially in the center of towns where old and new and incomplete-but-occupied buildings commingled alongside narrow congested streets, the lack of a cohesive town plan was stark. The orderliness of Miami’s houses didn’t matter much to Plum, except for the fact that the differences underscored how much her life would change now that she was returning to her childhood home.
And on to Brooklyn, also a world apart from island life, familiar to the child still inside her, and unfamiliar to the woman she had become. Back to parents who opened their arms and drew her in as if they hadn’t exiled her from their lives and then abandoned her when she found unexpected trouble. Plum stepped into their embrace, her response tentative, theirs full and inviting. For the moment, their embrace, this timid welcome, was all Plum had. Realizing the extent of her isolation, Plum cried, letting her head fall onto her mother’s shoulder as she had done as a child. There was desperation in Plum’s embrace, a need to belong.
“Glad you came back home,” her father said, as if the choice to stay had been hers. “Don’t ever think you can’t come back home.”
“Yes.” Plum wiped away the teardrops glistening on her lashes, and let the moment be what it was: an inevitable reunion.
Plum had forgotten how bright America was, how the fluorescent lighting in the airport allowed no shadows or dark corners. Outside the terminal, even with the winter’s cold burning her fingers and toes and grabbing hold of her breath, Plum slowed her steps and looked up to catch a glimpse of a star. She had forgotten that too, that the city’s lights muted the starlight, that nightfall didn’t mute life. Two years away and Plum had grown accustomed to the quiet the nights brought, the chirps of nocturnal life rather than the incessant honking and beeping from vehicles on the road, her aunt saying, “I don’t want night to catch me on the road” as if the dark was the devil himself.
Back to the suspended life she had grown away from and moved past. The Cabbage Patch dolls and stuffed animals, all rainbow colored, were in her room awaiting her return. There was her locked diary with its key dangling from the cover, full of petty concerns; a pink-and-white radio with a cassette tape of poorly-recorded songs and a radio announcer’s voice cutting in and out of the music; a pair of black ballet shoes; and another pair of hot pink plastic sandals.
That first week back, Plum walked up and down the blocks, looking for familiar faces and places, recalling scents and sounds of her interrupted Brooklyn childhood. She cried when she found that what she had moved past—the smelly Utica Avenue stores with dusty and cheap plastic wares, peddling a plastic Christmas and unbearable holiday cheer; the men still hanging on street corners and looking out on a world that seemed to be passing them by—weren’t the things that mattered. The friends Plum had left behind—Dionne, Roxanne, and Walter, who were now two shiny, bubbly young women, and one confident and swaggering young man—had gone on to colleges in Pennsylvania and Buffalo and Atlanta. And Plum, the one who had been sent away to bypass the undesirable temptations of Brooklyn, had returned empty-handed to a city she no longer loved, a child’s bedroom with dusty Cabbage Patch dolls and old music on cassette tapes. She had moved past nothing that mattered.