Chapter 31

31

ADA STOOD ON THE WOODEN BOARDS OF THE STATION PLATFORM IN EMPIRE WITH her sack in her arms. It was filled with the same things she had arrived with nearly a month earlier, although this time, unlike the last, between the little she had saved for herself and the single crown coin still in her possession, she had just enough money for her passage on the big ship.

She also had, safe in her pocket, the letter that Michael had delivered to her. She had been huddled in the boxcar when a voice called her name, but because she had been trying to stay hidden, she had not answered at first. The voice had called her again, and eventually a face had come up to the opening and peered inside. Michael, the mail messenger, had smiled when he saw her and had pulled an envelope out of his sack. “I spent most of the morning looking for you. I know you have been waiting for this.”

Shocked, Ada had stayed where she was. “Mr. Oswald didn’t send you?” she had asked hesitantly.

“Mr. Oswald? No. I didn’t speak to Mr. Oswald, miss. Only the cook. When I went to the house, she told me you’d gone. She nearly shut the door in my face, but I did manage to ask her where you’d gone to, and she muttered something about a boxcar out here in the bush.”

“The cook?”

“Yes, miss. I never spoke to Mr. Oswald, I swear.”

Of course, Ada thought. She imagined Antoinette smugly saying that Ada was gone. Antoinette had never liked her, and Ada could never—would never—understand why. She might have cared to figure it out, to march back to the house and confront Antoinette herself, except that any thought of such pettiness was erased by the sight of the envelope Michael was still holding forth. Slowly, Ada had crawled forward to take it from him. Her mother’s writing-hand on the front made tears well in her eyes.

“Are you okay?” Michael had asked, and Ada had nodded even though in truth the answer depended on what the letter inside the envelope said.

Years on, Michael would return to Virginia, where he was from, and in a place called Canton Hills he would start a parcel delivery service that he would operate for forty-five years before handing it down to his son. It would be an enterprise successful enough that it would allow him to purchase a house, which he would fill with all manner of personal effects, including a phonograph and an icebox and a set of brass candlesticks. But on that day he had merely handed Ada the envelope, then cleared his throat, and Ada had watched him trek back out of the jungle with the mailbag on his hip.

Now, Ada peered down the track. For forty minutes she had been waiting, with her sack at her feet, for the train that would take her to Colón. She reached into her dress pocket, pulled out the letter, and read it again.

My dearest Ada,

I have been trying to write this for some time, not knowing what to say and being poor at lettering as I am. Your Departure came as a shock, though I know how you are. I know you have always been rootless, not a Tree but a Leaf, taken up by the wind. My thoughts have been of worry, so I was Happy to receive your letter. I was Happy to know you are well, suffering no injury. That leads me to tell you the news. By good fortune and the will of the Lord a Doctor came to the house to accomplish the procedure for Millicent. The Doctor believes she will go on to be well. You can come back to us now. We will be wishing to see you as soon as you are able. Come home. A Leaf can grow again on the Tree.

I send this with all Love from your mother

Ada tucked the letter away and curled her fingers till her nails dug into her palms, so happy she thought she might burst. She had been scared, so scared this whole time, that she would not earn enough money, that time would run out, that Millicent would not make it through. But Millicent was okay. A doctor had come to the house. Ada hardly cared that the money she’d earned had made no difference. The ￡5 she had sent was probably only now reaching them. But truly she did not care. She only cared that Millicent was well.

***

OMAR GAZED OUT the window as the train kinked and chugged. After the officer had run off, the protest had taken on the feel of a festival—people setting off firecrackers and singing—and although Omar had been as exhilarated as everyone else, it had been a long day, and he had been ready at last to go home.

The train made its usual stops, and Omar stared out at everything passing by—towns and telegraph poles, palm trees and hills. When the train neared Empire, he felt himself tense. Even from within the train car, he could hear the hammering drills, could smell the bitter smoke. The work never stopped. It would not stop until the canal reached the oceans, and the Culebra Cut, the nine-mile stretch where he had spent the last six months of his life, would be only one part of a larger cut that spanned Panamá. He had always known that, of course, but now it seemed different to him—less promise than pain—and he knew he would not go there again.

Omar averted his gaze. Through the windows along the other side of the train car he saw, just barely through the glass, a flash of bright yellow and brown. Or that is what he thought he saw. He stood, peering around and between the newly boarded passengers who were walking down the aisle, but he could not locate the colors again. He knew only one person they could belong to, though. The train whistle blew. Quickly, without thinking about it, Omar sidestepped out from his seat, squeezed past everyone in the aisle, and got off the train.

***

ADA DID NOT know where he had come from. She had been looking up behind her, toward the Oswalds’ house, praying that neither Mr. Oswald nor Antoinette could see her down here, and when she turned back, she saw Omar crossing the platform toward her. His clothes were rumpled and muddied, and when he came closer and took off his hat, she noticed the cut on his lip.

She gasped. “What happened to you?”

Omar raised his hand to his mouth, gingerly touching the wound. “Nothing,” he said.

“Doesn’t look like nothing. Don’t tell me you went and got yourself in a fight?”

She had been joking, but he answered, “Something like that.”

Ada frowned. “Did you?”

“I am okay,” he said.

She studied the cut again. It was fresh, but it would heal before long. Some ice would help with the swelling. She sighed. “Well, you will be in time.”

Omar pointed to her sack. “You are going somewhere?”

Ada’s face broke into a smile. “Yes, I got word. My sister is well.”

“How wonderful!” Omar said, with genuine warmth. But then he furrowed his eyebrows. “That means you are going home?”

She nodded. “There’s a ship leaving tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“Provided I don’t miss it. I been waiting here for some time for the train to Colón.”

Several other people were standing out on the platform with them, and Ada took that as a good sign—the more people who were waiting, the sooner the train was probably due to arrive. On the far side of the tracks, Ada could hear the thundering sounds she had come to associate with the canal.

“What about you?” she asked. “You coming up from work just now?”

“No,” Omar said. “I was coming from Gatún, on the other end of the zone.”

“What were you doing out there?”

“The Americans want to move the town. They want to build a dam across the river instead—for the canal.”

“You helping build the dam, or—?”

“No. There was a protest. I was joining the people of Gatún.”

Ada grinned. “You were joining the people of Panama.”

“Yes.”

“That explains what happened to you, then?”

Omar touched his lip again. “No, this was different.”

She laughed. “You saying you been in two fights today?”

Sheepishly, he smiled, which only made her laugh more.

Not for the first time, Ada thought how much she enjoyed talking to him. At home, she relied so much on the company of her mother and sister, the three of them wound together in their own cocoon, that she never quite made space for anyone else. Omar had shown her how nice it could be, talking and laughing with someone new. He came across as mild most of the time, but there was a rumbling beneath the surface that she recognized.

Briefly, Ada glanced down the tracks again. No doubt the train would arrive before long—she was counting on it—but now she found herself hoping that it would be an extra few minutes before it did.

***

EVEN IF DO?A Ruiz herself had predicted it, Omar would not have believed almost anything about this day. In a matter of hours, so much had happened that he could hardly make sense of it all. And now Ada, standing before him, was leaving Panamá to go home.

He watched her peer down the track, eager for the train. He was happy for her, of course. He knew how worried she had been. He only wished it did not mean that she had to leave.

Omar picked his fingernail lightly against the crisscrossed straw fibers of his hat. He knew what he wanted to say. He wanted to ask her to stay in Panamá longer—even just one day more. There was so much here she probably had not seen yet. He could show her the web-footed geckos that scampered up the walls of his house and the crabs that pinced over the rocks in the bay. He could take her to the fish market or to other places in the city she might not have seen—to Avenida Central, to the plazas, to the squares where women sat behind folding tables with lottery tickets laid out like the scales of a fish, to the carnicerías and panaderías and farmacias, the cafeterías and cafés, to the teatro and the Casa del Cabildo and the seawall along Las Bovedas. Or he could show her the old city, the original city, Panamá La Vieja, and walk with her among the mossy ruins and stand in the cathedral tower that had no roof and stare up at the stars. He could show her how in Panamá it was possible to watch the sun rise over the Pacific and set over the Atlantic all in one day. He could show her places he had only heard about, could see them for the first time with her, the old cannons at Portobelo and the crashing waves at Pedasí, the highlands and the lowlands, the lush green mountains of Boquete and the beautiful dark jungle of Darién. He could show her the mangrove swamps whose roots had spread through the silt for thousands of years, the toucans and shimmering quetzals in the trees, the howler monkeys who moaned every morning at dawn, the glass frogs whose heart and tiny bones you could see through its skin, the silk moths and butterflies that alit on the leaves. He could buy her a bowl of sancocho or an empanada or a boiled tamale. They could sit outside listening to a tamborito in the indigo-orange light at dusk. It did not matter to him what they did. He just wanted to keep being around her, and for the simplest reason: All his life he had been lonely, but when he was with her he felt less alone.

***

THEY BOTH STARTLED at the blast of the train whistle. Ada reached down and lifted her sack. “I guess that means it’s time,” Ada said, smiling wide.

“Ada,” Omar said.

“Yes?”

There was a crack in the atmosphere now, just big enough that he could have said what he wanted to say. But her smile, and the pure happiness he knew she was feeling at the thought of going home, made him swallow his words. Instead he said, “I wanted to thank you again. For that day on the street.”

The sound of the train engine grew louder as the locomotive neared. He was aware that around him people were shuffling toward the front of the platform, lining up. Ada stood in front of him wearing that same patchwork dress. The sunlight caught in her eyes.

“Well, I thank you, too,” she said, “for being my friend.”

Behind them, the train slowed to a stop. With a lump in his throat, Omar watched Ada adjust the sack in her arms.

“My mother and sister are waiting for me,” she said.

“Como u?a y carne,” Omar managed to say.

“What does that mean?”

“It means you are very close, like the fingernail and the flesh.”

“Yes,” Ada said, and her smile as she walked by him and climbed up onto the train was somehow even brighter than it had been before.

Omar stood on the platform, watching the train chug away. Slowly, he put his hat back on and tried to untangle the particular feeling he had then. There was a hollow space in his chest because he would not see her again, and at the same time, in that very same space, a quiet joy because she had called him a friend.

***

ONE WEEK LATER, the ship eased into the port at Carlisle Bay. Ada deboarded and, with a smile so big that it made her cheeks hurt, she walked through the green, past the fountain and the House of Commons and the savings bank, all of it more beautiful than she remembered, then up High Street, then left onto Magazine Lane. When she smelled a fish cake, she stopped just long enough to buy one from a woman on the street. She was so hungry after the trip that she could not resist. She popped the entire thing in her mouth, and it was so perfectly crispy and salty that it brought tears to her eyes.

When she got to Aster Lane, Ada paused and peered down the length of it. She took a deep breath of the familiar sweet air. Then, with her sack bouncing in her arms, she ran. Past the houses and plots she had known all her life, past the Wimple house, the Pennington house, the Callender house with its fat cherry tree, on and on till she got to her own. She stopped and stared. What a wonderful house it seemed to her now, with its slatted shutters and porch. But it was more than that. Ada had always believed that her mother, in rebuilding the house only three miles from where it had once been, had kept her world piteously small, but maybe what mattered, Ada thought as she gazed at it now, was not how big or how small her mother’s world was, but that her mother had managed to keep it at all. It must have been no trifling thing to carve out a space of her own, to protect it and hold within it the people she loved.

She was panting by the time she ran up the steps of the porch and set her hand on the knob of the front door. Slowly, she pushed it open and peeked inside. At the sound of the creaking door, she saw both her mother and Millicent look up. They were sitting together at the hearth, sewing. Millicent jumped to her feet first and ran to hug Ada tight, holding her for so long that Ada thought Millicent might never let go. From over Millicent’s shoulder, Ada saw her mother stand up as she blinked back tears. She said, “Thank the Lord you come back.” She walked closer and circled her arms around them both, and as the three of them stood in the light of the house, it was exactly where Ada wanted to be.

***

IN PANAMA CITY, Omar got off the train and walked through the streets, out, out, out until he came to the long road that traced a path to the bay. The sky was speckled with stars, tiny wobbles of light.

He trudged down the road, past the house of Do?a Ruiz, past the trees and the ferns. At the mouth of the bay, he walked up to his own house and opened the door. His father, who was sitting at the table, glanced up.

At the sight of his son, Francisco’s mouth dropped open. He had looked for so long. Hours, it had been. An entire afternoon during which he had trekked up and down, to and fro, with his feet and his sandals sunk in the mud, a futile afternoon that had left him more disconsolate than he had been at the start—and now? No matter that Omar coming home was entirely expected, that he regularly walked through the front door at this hour. To Francisco, seeing his son standing before him only confirmed what he had felt earlier, a belief that mystery and faith were again part of his life. After so much searching, perhaps he had found all the things that he thought he had lost.

Francisco blinked once. He blinked twice. From his open mouth, he said, “Hello.”