House Arrest by Mary Morris Read Free Book Online Page B

one of his haunts. I eye him suspiciously and then he offers, “Word gets around.”
    I tell him that I have had some problems with immigration and I am not allowed to leave the hotel. That, in fact, I am being deported in the next few days, and he doesn’t look very surprised.
    “Have they told you what they think you’ve done?”
    “They haven’t told me a thing.” I ask him what he thinks the problem is and he shrugs. “Do you think it’s because of Isabel?”
    He shrugs. “Who knows? It could be because of anything,” he says.
    Manuel and I make a plan. He will return the next evening and have dinner with me. In the meantime he will try to talk with some people to see if this can’t be cleared up. I ask him if I should contact Rosalba and he presses his lips together. “Let me think about that,” he says. “We’ll figure a way out of this mess.”
    He kisses me on the cheek when he leaves, pressing my hand. “You still look great, baby; you really do.”
    “Have you … have you heard from her?” I gather the nerve to ask him after all.
    “Oh, sure, from time to time. You know, messages get through. She’s fine. She’s living in Spain.”
    “Spain?”
    “Yes. She likes it there.”
    I go back upstairs to my room and try Todd again. He answers on the first ring. I can’t talk, I tell him, but try to understand. The weather is not good, the climate is bad. If I can, I’m going to Jamaica.
    “Is the weather any better there?” he asks. Then he pauses as if something has just occurred to him. “Maggie, are you all right?”
    “Yes, I’m fine. Or at least I think I am.”
    He clears his throat the way Todd does when he’s starting to get concerned. “What does that mean? Is there some kind of trouble? Is something wrong?”
    “I can’t tell you now. I wish I could …” I think maybe I will tell him, but there is a loud crackling sound and the line goes dead.

Seven
    I IMAGINE Isabel writing from a village in Spain:
On the island where I come from, we have the smallest beasts. A frog that will rest on your fingernail. A mammal no bigger than a thimble that looks like a shrew. The pygmy owl a child can cup in his fist. And the zunzuncito, the world’s smallest bird, often mistaken for a bumblebee. This hummingbird’s wings beat with the force of a turbo engine, but its heart can be broken with the pressure of a thumb. It is amazing that in this world of little things we are ruled by someone so big that we cannot help but feel small. As if we too have come to rest in another’s palm
.
    There are things I miss that I never thought I would. The sea is not the same because this one crashes against rocks and the earth is red and must be coaxed for something to grow. There is no scent of lemons, no sweet fruits I can pluck from the trees. These Spaniards wear black and are serious about life. I never wake to music blaring
,
people dancing in the street. No one throws cowrie shells at the ground to predict what lies ahead
.
    I miss the color of mangoes, fuchsia flowers. A hundred kinds of palm trees, the dolphins that swam beside me in the sea. But some places, like some people, are best loved from afar. Some places are better when they are remembered
.

Eight
    T HE DAY after Isabel stood me up, she left a message at the hotel. The desk clerk smiled as he handed me a slip of paper, torn from a child’s notebook. I could barely decipher her penciled scrawl. She wrote that there had been a problem with the buses and she had been delayed, that there was no phone in the district where she was so she couldn’t call. She pleaded with me to return, to come back and see her again.
    The next afternoon I made my way through the same tangle of vines, the same maze of thorny bushes that I’d come down the day before. The untended fruit trees had dropped their rotten fruit. A rodent peered at me, then scurried away with a tamarind between his orange teeth as I knocked on the door, which was on the floor