Chapter 18
The last evening before he flew back to England, Marcus sat with his mother at the small table by the window in their room the same table where she wrote in her notebook. The same window that showed the same corner of the same yard.
She had made his favourite meal they ate and talked about ordinary things the neighbors a cousin who had gotten married, a book she was reading, The kind of conversation that is only possible when the important things have already been said, when you have moved past the formal and into the simple fact of each other's company.
Afterward when the plates were cleared, she put the notebook on the table.
I've been keeping this since I was fourteen, she said. You know that?
He hadn't known, He knew she wrote he hadn't known how long.
When you were born I started writing about you she opened the notebook to a page near the beginning, Her handwriting, younger and slightly less certain than it was now, filling the lines every day almost what you did what you said. What you made me feel.
He looked at the pages without reading them the intimacy of them felt too large.
You gave me something to write toward she said Something to build toward before you I was just writing down what happened after you, I was writing toward a future. You understand the difference?
He understood. He had been doing the same thing, in his own way, since he'd learned from Mr. Okafor to take up space on the page.
I'm going to give you this, she said. When you finish. When you come back for good I'll give you all of it.
Why not now?
She smiled a rare, unguarded smile that changed her whole face because we haven't gotten to the ending yet.
He flew back to England the next morning he looked out the window as the island fell away beneath the plane, that specific violet and gold that was only Jamaica, the Blue Mountains catching the first light.
He was not the same boy who had looked out a taxi window at nine years old, memorizing a street he was afraid of losing.
He knew who he was now. It had taken seven years and considerable mileage and a shoebox full of letters and a teacher who told him to stop being polite. But he knew.
He was Marcus Elijah Campbell, born in Kingston on a morning when the sky turned violet. He was his mother's courage and his auntie's patience and Mama Vie's kiss pressed into his forehead like a seal. He was Leroy's loyalty and Mr. Okafor's permission he was Arnett Gardens and Caldmore Primary and the mango tree and the cold bus stop and the running track and the long-distance phone line.
He was not one thing or another.
He was everything that had made him and he was going to use all of it.