She’s horrid, I thought. But I said, “She’s always the same. She doesn’t change.”
My mother brought me the bowl. “No,” she said, her voice amused. “I don’t suppose she does.”
She folded her arms on the table and watched me eat. I felt her pleasure — probably every bit as much pleasure as I had, consuming the wonderful red soup.
“Did anyone teach you to cook?” she said.
“No.” I reached for the tall blue glass of water she’d poured me. This taste, too, was a surprise, charged with minerals and an icy metallic aftertaste.
“The water comes from the mineral spring out back,” she said, “After lunch I’ll take you around.”
“I can cook a little,” I said, thinking of my sorry attempt at vegetarian lasagna. “And I can ride a bike, and swim.”
“Can you row a boat?” she asked.
“No.”
“Do you know how to grow an organic garden? Can you sew your own clothes? Can you drive a car?”
“No.” I wanted to impress her, somehow. I can turn invisible, I thought. I can hear thoughts.
She cleared the table, saying over her shoulder, “I have my work cut out for me, I see.”
A small cat with blue-gray fur and with pale green eyes strolled into the kitchen. It sniffed my leg, then rubbed its face against me.
“May I touch it?” I asked.
Mãe looked up from the sink. “Hello, Grace,” she said to the cat. “Of course,” she said to me. “Haven’t you ever had a pet?”
“No.”
“Well, here you’ll have several.”
Grace sauntered over and sniffed my hand. Then she turned her back on me. Clearly, I’d have to prove I was worthy.
The three of us, Grace trailing my mother and me, walked around the stable: a long blue building behind the house, each stall empty, smelling of sweet hay.
Mãe had four horses, grazing in a paddock. She called their names: Osceola, Abiaka, Billie, and Johnny Cypress. The horses came to her, and she introduced me to them.
“May I touch them?” I’d never been this close to the horses in Saratoga Springs.
“Of course.”
She stroked Osceola’s neck, and I petted Johnny Cypress. He was the smallest of the four, with a light gray coat and blue eyes. The others’ coats ranged from pure white to ivory to cream.
I asked about their names, and she said they came from leaders of the Seminole tribe. “I guess you haven’t learned about them?” she said.
I shook my head.
“Native Americans who were never conquered. Osceola led them in battle against the United States. And you don’t know much about horses?”
“I sometimes watched horses at the racetrack,” I said. “We’d go early in the morning, when they were exercising.”
“We meaning you and your father?”
“No. I had a friend. Her name was Kathleen. She was murdered.”
I told her what I knew about Kathleen’s death. She put her arms around me when I finished.
“The killer hasn’t been caught?” she asked.
“Not so far as I know.” For the first time in months, I wanted to call home.
“Raphael doesn’t know you’re here.” She said it flatly, as if she knew it.
“I left a note.” I didn’t want to meet her eyes. “It was kind of vague, though. He’d left to go to some conference in Baltimore, and I felt — I wanted to find you.”
“Baltimore? He left in January?”
I nodded.
“Some things don’t change.”
Osceola whinnied, and she said to him, “It’s all right.”
“Could I ride one of them, someday?”
“Of course.” She took my hands in hers, and examined them. “Have you ever ridden?”
“No.”
“All right then,” she said, “we’ll add riding to our list of things to learn.”
Next she showed me the honeybee hives: stacks of wooden boxes like the ones Mr. Winters kept, near a grove of orange and lemon trees. “You can taste the citrus in the honey,” she said.
“Does it taste different from lavender honey?” I was thinking of her cookbook, back in Saratoga.
She stopped walking. “Yes,” she said, her voice soft. “Nothing compares to lavender honey, in my opinion. But I can’t grow lavender here. I’ve tried. It always dies.”
The path circled a garden patch, and she named the crops: peanuts, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, lettuce, gourds, squash, and beans of all sorts. A small blue-painted cottage bordered the garden. Mãe called it the guest house.
“We breed the horses, and that makes enough money to let us do the rescues,” she said.
Rescues? I thought. I had more pressing questions. “We meaning you and — what was the name?”
“Dashay. She’s at a horse auction today. She’ll be back tomorrow.”
“Are you and Dashay a couple?” I’d barely met my mother, yet I felt jealous. I wanted her undivided attention.
She laughed. “We’re a couple of idiots. Dashay is my good friend. I met her when I was running away, like you. She helped me buy the land here, and we share the work and the profits.”
I stared at my mother — sun glinting on her hair, topaz eyes. “Are you in love with anyone?” I asked.
“I’m in love with the world,” she said. “How about you, Ariella?”
“I’m not sure,” I said.
May in Florida is a curious time. My mother called it the last-chance month; with June 1 came hot humid rainy days, she said, and the start of hurricane season.
That night the temperatures fell into the sixties, and we wore sweaters when we took a stroll after dinner, down to the river. A small wooden dock jutted into a harbor, and tied to it were three boats: a canoe, a motorboat, and a pedal boat. “Want to take her out?” Mãe said.
“Which one?”
“Let’s start the easy way,” she said.
I climbed awkwardly into the pedal boat, and she untied the lines and jumped in, so lightly that the boat barely moved. Then we pedaled off, down the river.
The full moon slipped in and out of clouds, and the night breeze was sweet, smelling of orange blossoms. “You live in a wonderful world,” I said.
She laughed, and the sound of her laughter seemed to sparkle in the dark air. “I’ve built it carefully,” she said. “I gave up my heart when I left Saratoga.” Her face wasn’t sad, merely thoughtful. “We have so much to tell each other,” she said. “It can’t all be told in one day.”
The boat moved into open water, and ahead I saw the lights of the hotel where I’d spent the previous night, and the thin beam from the lighthouse on Monkey Island.
“Poor monkeys,” I said. I told her about watching them from the hotel.
My mother’s eyes flashed. “Do you know the story? The original monkeys were put on the island after they’d been used to develop a vaccine for polio. They were the survivors — the ones who weren’t paralyzed or dead. So their reward was to become a tourist attraction.”
We pedaled closer. Bob sat on a rock, staring at nothing. The other, smaller monkey hung from a tree branch and watched our approach. Mãe made a funny clicking sound with her tongue, and Bob stood up. He walked down to the rocks on the island’s edge. The other monkey sprang out of his tree and loped after Bob.
What happened next is hard to describe. It’s as if my mother and Bob had a conversation across the water, though no words were spoken. The other monkey kept out of it, and so did I.
“All right then,” Mãe said after a few minutes had passed. She looked again at Bob. Then she steered the boat to the side of the island not visible from the resort. We hit bottom several yards from the shoreline. She waded ashore, moving so gracefully that she barely made a splash. I sat and watched, wanting to cheer, not making a sound.
When Mãe reached the shore, Bob was waiting. He wrapped his arms around her neck and his legs around her waist. The other monkey climbed onto her shoulders and clasped her neck. She waded back, more slowly now. The monkeys stared at me, their small eyes bright, curious. I wanted to greet them, but kept mum as they climbed into the boat. They sat on the floor, in the stern.
We left the harbor as quietly as before.
I was thrilled beyond words. Not only had I found my mother — I’d found a hero, and two monkeys as well.
Bob wasn’t his real name, it turned out. He was Harris.
My mother and Harris sat in the living room later that night, working out the details. The other monkey, Joey, had a snack of apples and sunflower seeds, then went off to bed in the guest house.
Mãe and Harris communicated with gestures, eye movements, grunts, and nods. When they were done, they hugged each other, and Harris nodded at me as he left for the guest house.
“How did you learn to communicate with monkeys?” I asked.
“Oh, we’ve had monkeys here before.” She stood up and stretched her arms. “Some were pets who’d been abandoned, and some came off Monkey Island. You realize that the hotel will replace Harris and Joey, don’t you? They always do.”
I hadn’t thought of it. “Then we can rescue the new ones, too?”