Unripened Fruit
ACT 1
We stood at the very tip of the island, where
the wild ocean meets the placid sound in perpetual combat. The sky was gray. The
horizon was beginning to blur due to the approaching fog. Typical weather in
October, or any month of the year really.
Heidi
rose up on her tiptoes, her turquoise windbreaker zipped up to her chin and the
hood pulled tight over her head. She stuffed her hands inside her jacket
pockets and bit on the zipper with her front teeth.
After
a while, Heidi let go of the zipper and began to rock back and forth on her
heels.
“You
know,” she casually spoke, “I wouldn’t really care if I died right now.”
“Wait,
what?” I spat, surprised at her sudden revelation.
“If
I were to walk out into the water right now and let it take me away, or if I
were to die in a car crash on the way back, or if someone were to drive along
and shoot me, I’d be okay.”
“Well
none of those things are going to happen, obviously,” I quickly reassured her,
inching a little closer with the fear that she might plunge into the sea.
“But
why do you say that, Heidi? You don’t really mean it.”
Heidi
turned to face me, her hazel eyes piercing me with their honesty.
“Why,
yes I do.”
Heidi stepped up on a little boulder alone in the sand. She
threw her arms back and lifted her face up into the wind, closing her eyes.
“Why
would you say something like that, Heidi? Don’t you realize how many people you
would hurt if you were to suddenly stop breathing? Don’t you realize how many
people would miss you?”
She
didn’t move from her position.
“I
have nothing left to give,” she said, the wind carrying her voice in a hundred
different directions.
ACT 2
She’d never been off
the island before, never in her seventeen years. Never been farther off the
shore than she could swim. Off island trips were just a part of life for me.
I’ve had the same pediatrician on the mainland ever since I was born, I rode
the ferry across the channel to nearby towns with the high school softball
team, and I would always spend the holidays with my mother’s family who lives
in a landlocked suburb. Heidi’s
family saw plane tickets and ferry passes as economically unreasonable. The
island had a hospital (though the quality was questionable), Heidi’s asthma
made sports anathema, and the little extended family she had lived right down
the road.
INTERLUDE
Heidi May’s mother was the superintendant of
the local school system. Her mother’s position gave Heidi deep roots into the
island. She could not see very far beyond. An only child, Heidi lived with her
mother and father in an old farmhouse in the rustic, brushy town away from the
heart of the island. If it weren’t for the American flag flying off the porch
and the Ford parked in the dirt driveway, some may have deemed the house
abandoned. Half of the fence surrounding the property was painted white, the
other half the same dispirited gray of the house itself. Nevertheless, it was
May’s home and it had been that way for as long as I have known.
The
first thing someone noticed about Heidi was her posture. What was it exactly?
Her limbs were long and lean, not very muscular, though not cadaverous. Even
her torso seemed to be unnaturally extended. She often stood with her long legs
crossed, one over the other, her hands on her hips. Something about Heidi made
her look like a paper doll, only much more pliable. She seemed to fold into
herself, her body taking on strange shapes, simultaneous obtuse and acute
angles. Her wild white blond hair was always tied into a loose bun hanging to
the side of her head. She wore overalls.
ACT 3
The summer we were sixteen,
a boy named Peter Place came to town, and Heidi fell in love.
“I
don’t care that he is only here for three weeks. I don’t care that I don’t know
if he loves me back. I still love him,” she told me one night, lying on her
back, stretched across my bed, letting her head fall over the edge, her hair
touching the floor.
Peter’s
father was a marine biologist and was assigned a project recording whale calls
off of the island. I never heard about his mother. Peter brought along a friend
named Dylan. What Heidi and I were, whatever we were, Peter and Dylan were the
male equivalent. Heidi would be Peter, so I guess that means I would be Dylan.
There really was some kind of connection between Peter and Heidi although I
wouldn’t call it love. They were incredibly similar, almost the same person.
Both did not know where they were going. They were wanderers and Dylan and I were
the ones always by their side reminding them that they were not lost.
The
following September after school had started, Heidi confessed to me something
that she had never confessed to anyone besides her diary.
“I
need to tell someone,” she explained, “and you are my best friend. So I think I
should tell you.”
One
afternoon while I was off island, Heidi had gone to the beach with Peter and
Dylan. As they were lounging on their towels, somehow the conversation turned
towards the topic of kissing. The two boys began to playfully argue over which
one is the better kisser. Heidi had an idea. She would close her eyes and each
one would kiss her. Then she would have to say which one was better. But, she
explained, there was a disclaimer. Sheepishly, she broke the “ awfully
embarrassing” news that she was a prude. So, whichever boy kissed her first
would be the first to ever kiss her.
Dylan
was the first. But Peter was the best. She told me she could tell which kiss
belonged to what boy by the way they smelled. She told me when she smelled
Dylan’s breath coming towards her lips she wanted to cry.
“Whatever,”
she sighed the day their ferry left for the mainland. “I didn’t really like
them anyway.”
ACT 4
Public tragedies are
a rarity here on our island. Of course there are fatal diagnoses and
confessions inside each home but it is not very often that the entire community
shares a common sorrow. Still, that does not mean that they do not happen. Two days after we started our junior
year of high school, two kids from our class were killed in a boating accident.
A boy and a girl, a brother and a sister. The girl was in our class. The boy
was just a year behind.
Heidi
and I were sitting on her front porch steps, drinking lemonade and trying to
soak up as much warmth as possible before the bitter winter cold rolled in. We
heard the screen door screech as her mother pushed it open and carefully closed
it behind her. I leaned over into Heidi so she could squeeze past us on the
steps. At the bottom she turned to face us and squatted down to our level,
folding her hands on her knees. There, she explained to us what had just
happened earlier that morning. As the superintendant, she was one of the first
people on the island to know.
When
she asked if we understood, we nodded slowly. When she asked us if we were okay,
we both let our shoulders give a loose shrug. Neither one of us were very
expressive when it came to emotion. I’ll never know whether that is a trait
innate in each of us or whether one adapted it from the other.
Mrs.
May placed a hand on each of our heads. She took her one hand off of mine and
let the other run down the edge of Heidi’s face until she was holding her chin
with her thumb.
When
I heard Mrs. May turn the kitchen sink on in the kitchen through the open
windows, I turned to Heidi. She stared out into the empty road, and beyond
that, the thicket, and beyond that the sea. Her glass was pressed against her
lips, but she wasn’t drinking.
We
were silent for a long time.
Mrs.
May was doing the dishes. I could hear the clatter of silverware scraping
against plates and being placed in the dishwasher.
Finally,
the sink stopped running and somewhere in the house a television was switched
on. I could hear the laughing of a sitcom, but I couldn’t hear what the
characters were saying.
“Say
something.”
My head snapped to look at Heidi, who was looking at me.
My head snapped to look at Heidi, who was looking at me.
“You
say something,” I retorted.
“I
asked you first.”
I
shifted my body so I was sitting upright and placed my glass on the step where
my feet rested. I wiped my wet fingers on the side of my jean cutoffs.
“I
think that this is going to change the atmosphere of this school year,” I said.
Heidi
nodded in agreement.
“I
think that now they are free.”
ACT 5
It was February, but
the only pink in the kitchen was the color of our cheeks, flushed by the harsh
draft. Outside was nothing but night.
The small lantern hanging above the kitchen door on the porch even failed to
shed a bit of direction upon the darkness.
Heidi
and I sat at the May’s kitchen table, knee deep in impossible physics problems.
Her parents sat in the living room, separated by a wooden half wall, watching
the evening news.
9. You
have a glass of water that is 70° F. You then drop an ice
cube into the glass. What is the temperature of the water after all the ice has
melted?
Heidi
groaned and dramatically let her forehead fall onto her textbook, sending her
pencil to shoot off the table and across the tile floor. Her bun flopped onto
my own notebook.
“I.
Give. Up,” she announced in a muffled voice.
“We
could just circle it and go in tomorrow before school. He’ll practically give
us the answers,” I suggested, chewing on the tip of my eraser and staring at
the light fixture hanging from the ceiling over the table.
“Tell
me again why I took this class?”
“We
ask ourselves that everyday.”
“That
is just awful.”
Heidi’s
head snapped up and we both craned our necks over towards the living room. This
kid-homework-parent-news-situation was pretty routine, but very rarely did
Heidi’s parents speak, let alone comment on what they were watching.
“What’s
the matter, Dad?”
Mr.
May sat with his elbows on his knees, running his fingers along his brown,
prickly scruff.
“It’s
this earthquake. The destruction just breaks your heart,” he responded in his
deep voice.
Heidi
stood up and leaned over the half wall to get a better look at the screen.
“What
earthquake? Where?”
“Haiti.
It happened earlier this week.”
I
got up to stand next to Heidi. On the television, an American male reporter was
standing speaking into a microphone, pointing off into the distance. There was
a road, a wide gravel road that seemed to travel all the way back to the
horizon. On either side of the road, makeshift tents of driftwood, blue tarp,
tattered cloth, and pipes stood shoulder to shoulder. However far the road
went, it seemed as if the tents would be lined up beside it. You know how
usually the sky makes whatever is on the ground appear to be so small? Well,
this sight seemed to make the sky look thin and weary. Insignificant.
The
screen changed to the view of a new camera, where a blond woman dressed for the
office sat on a plastic chair, also speaking into a microphone. She held a
little Haitian boy in her lap and there were about fifteen other children
surrounding her on the ground. All wore faded, unraveling clothes, all had
gaping, frantic eyes, all had thick, parted lips. I saw clouds of smoke behind
them. Or was it just dirt?
All of these children around me are orphans.
They had either lost their parents before the earthquake struck, or they lost
them in its aftermath…
ACT 6
“Rise
up! Rise up from those ashes! Because, my friends, if you have your face buried
in the ground, however will you be able to see the light?”
“Amen!
Amen!”
“Rise
up, my friends, my friends in Christ! Let me read you somethin’. This here comes from the book of Philippians,
Phillippians 3:8-11:
I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage,
that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my
own that comes from the law but which is through
faith in Christ. I want to know
Christ- yes, to know the power of his
resurrection and participation of his
sufferings, becoming like him in his death and so somehow attaining to the
resurrection from the dead.”
“Amen!”
“Friends,
love is a complicated word. A word that stretches from as far as the East is to
the West. No one understands its expanse. But, friends, I can tell you, one of
the reasons why I love Jesus Christ with all my heart and soul is because he
was once a man!”
“Amen!”
“He
was a man who has walked this earth
and has felt this pain, this sorrow, this
heartache! Friends, we are NEVER
alone.”
“Amen!
Amen!”
“And
why did Jesus do this? Why did he agree to take on the burden that comes along
with a beating heart and warm flesh? So he could rise again, brothers and sisters! He died and fell into the pits of
Hell so we, as sinners, would have the possibility of eternal life!”
“Amen!
Amen! Amen!”
“We,
we look ahead into the eyes of paradise. Where there is no pain! No sorrow! No
heartache! My friends, someday we will see the Lord with our own eyes!”
“AMEN!
AMEN!”
“But
before we leave this earth, before our hearts stop beating and our flesh runs
cold and stiff, we have a job to do-“
“Amen!”
“-we have job that we must do for the
Lord! Brothers and sisters, we are the face of Christ! We must live so that the
people we pass in our lives can look into our eyes and say I have seen the face of God!”
“Halleluiah!”
“We
are the body of Christ! We are His arms, His legs, His eyes, His ears, His
mouth! He lives inside our hearts as long
as we have faith!”
“Halleluiah!
Amen!”
“There
is a light before us, and it will not be long before we stand before God
Almighty. But until that day comes, we must never take a minute for granted.
May we use each to the benefit of God to the best of our abilities.”
“Amen,
Amen, Amen!”
“Brothers
and sisters, my family in Christ, do not
be afraid of death. Be afraid of dying with a life that is unfulfilled and a
story that is unfinished.”
ACT 7
In
Art History, we were learning about Oriental art. For homework, we were told to
write a haiku. Three syllables, five syllables, three syllables. Simple as
that.
We
stood up in front of the class to read them aloud.
Sun in the blue sky
Little fish in the blue sea
Blue: color of life
I saw a flying
Butterfly land on a branch
Wings settling down
Meow says the cat
Arf woof bark bark says the dog
Fun in the barnyard
What I fear the most
To hold a blank page and an
Empty ink bottle
ACT 8
We
trudged through the snow, soldiers in heavy boots making their way home.
“So,
I think I am going to ask my parents about traveling overseas this summer. The
government sponsors trips for students, you know. I guess they want us to be
more cultured or something.”
I
couldn’t help but let out a little HA but
quickly buried my mouth inside my scarf, wrapped up to my chin, when I saw
Heidi’s face, obviously hurt.
“What’s
so funny?”
“Heidi,
you have never even been on mainland. You have never been anywhere else besides
here. How are you going to get on a plane and go to a totally different
country?”
“Why
not?”
“Well-“
“It’s
not like you’ve been to another country either!”
The
wind blew in circles around us and we shrugged out backpacks higher up on our
shoulders and snuggled deeper into our winter coats. We marched along in
silence.
“So,
where would you go?” I broke the silence.
Heidi
stared straight ahead.
“Um,
maybe Haiti.”
“Heidi,
I don’t exactly think the government is going to pay for a young girl to travel
to a country currently in ruins.”
She
snapped her head around to give me the death stare. I’ve seen that face before.
Recently, I have seen it quite a lot.
“Why
not?”
“Well,
for starters, its dangerous.”
“So
what? Do you know how many people are there already with the Red Cross and-“
“Yes,
but those people aren’t sixteen years old.”
“So
you think I should just wait until I turn twenty five? What difference would
that make? What if I don’t even live to be twenty-five? What if I died right
now, huh? What if I dropped dead right now?”
“Well,
you told me you wouldn’t care.”
ACT 9
I
stood on the stoop outside the kitchen door. The same lamp was hanging above me
as the one when we watched nightmares unravel on the television, worlds away.
It still refused to shed any light into the darkness. But now, it wasn’t
because of the thickness of the night, it was because the night was already
ablaze by the clearest sky of the year, a sign that spring was approaching.
Every star was bright and distinct, each in their precise place throughout the
dusty Milk Way.
Each star does not move itself. Each has its
own spot. They all move together. One unit, I pondered.
The
austere winter weather seemed to have pushed into the May home, leaving room
for this crystal night. It was a Friday and I had come over to pick Heidi up to
go downtown to a friend’s. Before I even knocked on the door though, I could
feel the tension that had built up inside the house. I heard the screaming. The
slamming. So I stood, waiting for the storm to pass.
I
heard stomping through the kitchen, quieter through the living room, the foyer.
The screen door squeaked open and crashed shut. Stones scattered and clacked as
Heidi stormed across the driveway and across the road to the thicket. I could
see her in the light of the stars, her hands balled up into fists, stiff at her
side.
There
was one thick trunk among all the thin saplings lining the road. That is where
Heidi took refuge. She sat down on tree’s protruding roots, wrinkled but
strong, and leaned against the trunk. There, she finally let herself cry,
weeping into the night up at a nonexistent moon.
