Chapter 17
He went back to Kingston for the first time in seven years the summer he turned seventeen.
He had grown eleven inches since he'd left. His voice had changed three times, or so it felt. He had read several hundred books and run more miles than he could count and developed opinions about things he hadn't known existed when he was nine years old sitting in the backseat of the taxi watching his street go past.
The plane descended over the island and his chest did something complicated.
It was all there. The colour. The Blue Mountains hanging in the east like something painted, improbably detailed. The shimmer of heat coming off the tarmac. And the smell, once the plane door opened warm air, green things, something specific and unnameable that was only and exactly Jamaica.
His mother was at the airport.
She was smaller than he remembered. He understood, intellectually, that he had grown and she had not shrunk, but the ratio had changed so dramatically that for a moment it reorganized everything. He had the sudden, piercing awareness of how long seven years was. Of what it meant to be apart from someone for seven years at the rate of change of adolescence.
She looked at him. He looked at her. Then he crossed the arrivals hall in three strides and put his arms around her, and she was his mother and she was small and she was exactly as she had always been, and he was home.
She held him as tightly as she had at the airport seven years ago. Neither of them spoke for a long time.
"Too thin," she said finally, into his shoulder.
He laughed. "I run a lot."
"I'll fix that.
He spent three weeks in Kingston. He walked the old streets. The yard had changed — different families in some rooms, the yard concrete cracked in new places, the mango tree still there but wilder, less maintained. He sat in its branches the second day home and felt the strange doubling of memory and present.
Leroy was taller than him now, broader, with the look of a man about him. They embraced in the middle of the road like they were the only two people in the world.
"Look at you," Leroy said, holding him at arm's length. "Quietly brilliant."
Marcus laughed. "Shut up."
They talked for hours that first evening, sitting on the back wall of the yard in the warm dark, the sounds of the neighborhood around them. Marcus talked about England and Leroy talked about Kingston and they filled in seven years of letters and phone calls with the specific texture of being physically present together. Of seeing the face move when the words come.
"You going back?" Leroy asked.
"I have to finish school. Then university, if I get in."
"And then?"
Marcus looked out at the familiar rooftops. The mountains dark against the night sky. A dog barking somewhere to the east.
"Then I come home," he said.
"With something to bring," Leroy said. Not a question.
"With everything I learned," Marcus said. "And whatever I can build with it."
Leroy nodded slowly. "Good," he said. "Because this place needs people who went out and came back. Not just people who left."
They sat in silence for a while, comfortable in it.
"I never forgot," Marcus said. "I want you to know that. Not for one day."
"I know," Leroy said. "I always knew."