Excerpt: Kingston Dreams

Stevon saw Shayla for the first time in ten years through his rearview mirror on Old Hope Road as he was driving to work. She was walking in between the stopped traffic, selling bags of june plums. At first, he thought that she was just another illusion. For the first year after she had disappeared from his life, any beautiful dark-skinned girl that he saw out of the corner of his eye would look like her. Then, he would turn and get a closer look and it would be someone completely different. It had happened so many times that he stopped believing it was her, and eventually abandoned the idea that she would come and look for him. Small as Jamaica was, its first and third worlds did not often intersect. But this time, as he got closer, she still looked like Shayla. She was pregnant. This should not have been that surprising- she was 26 years old now- but it still startled him. Was it a mistake this time? Had it been a mistake the first time? Any doubts that it was her left his mind when she showed up next to his car window, her face only a foot away from his, holding up a bag of plums. In some ways she was still beautiful, but she was missing her fierce look of determination. Now, she looked worn.
“Shayla!” he exclaimed, loudly enough for her to hear him through the glass. He rolled down the window and felt the sticky, languid heat seep into the car. “Shayla,” he said again, unable to form a coherent sentence.
Shayla also stood frozen for several seconds, staring at him with a look on her face that Stevon could not read. “Good morning, Stevon,” she said finally. “Long time me nah see you.” She diverted her gaze to the tires of his Subaru Forester.
“How are you?” he asked finally, realizing as he said it what a dumb question it was.
“Not as good as you,” she said softly. She looked back up at him. “You’re a doctor now.”
It took Stevon a few puzzled seconds before he remembered that he was wearing his scrubs. “Yes.”
“I always knew you would be.” She held up a bag. “You want june plums?”
June plums were one of the few fruits that Stevon did not like. “How much?” he asked, pulling his wallet out of his briefcase.
“Fifty dollar give you half a dozen,” she answered.
He rummaged through his wallet. He began to grip a fifty, then changed his mind and took out a thousand dollar bill instead and handed it to her.
She stared at it. “Me nah have change for that,” she said. She handed it back to him. “Pay me back next time you see me.”
“No,” Stevon insisted, handing it back. “Keep the change.”
He saw a look of hurt flash across her face. The light turned green. “Come back for your change tomorrow.”
“Alright.” The cars behind him honked loudly as she handed him the bag of june
plums.
“Likkle more,” she said in a soft, sad voice.
“Later.” He threw the bag on the seat next to him and sped off down the road, managing to move forward a good quarter mile before the Kingston traffic caught up with him again. As he inched slowly along the two-lane roads that held four lanes worth of cars, he replayed the short scene over and over again in his mind, and each time left him with more questions.
When he arrived at the hospital, it took all of his concentration to will away the questions before he began his shift. The full emergency room kept his mind off of Shayla, but as soon as he took a break then that image of her, pregnant, selling fruit along the side of the road came right back up, as if a video had been paused inside of his head.
He went to the hospital cafeteria for dinner with his friend Everton, an emergency medical technician. For reasons that he couldn’t quite figure out, Stevon felt more comfortable around Everton than the other doctors, even though Everton shared none of the privileged background that Stevon did. They had been eating dinner together since Stevon had been assigned to Everton's shift, noon to midnight, a few months ago, shortly after he had started his job. They got their usual fare: chicken, rice, and peas, and looked for seats as far away from the patients’ families as possible. Neither of them wanted to look into the eyes of a worried parent or sibling during their break. They sat on plastic chairs in the corner, facing the wall.
Everton hungrily scooped up huge forkfuls of food while Stevon pushed the peas around on his plate, occasionally taking a bite.
“You alright, Stevon?” Everton asked, looking up from his half-eaten plate.
Stevon froze, his fork midway to his mouth, and put it back down on the plate. “Yeah, I'm fine,” he said with a sigh.
“You missing Jade?” Everton asked.
Stevon shrugged, looking down at his chicken drumstick.
“Me don’t know how you gwaan do it,” said Everton. “Six months with you here and Jade in New York?”
“Six months isn’t that long,” Stevon said, looking up. “And she’ll probably visit a couple of times before she graduates.”
“That still a long time for a Jamaican man. You know, I can find someone to keep you satisfied until she gets here. Jade never have to know, and it don’t really count until you’re married anyway.”
“We’ve discussed this before. It’s called cheating, and I don’t do it.”
Everton smiled. “You don’t have to get all uptight about it. Just thought I’d remind you that the offer still good.”
Stevon didn’t return his smile. His mind was back on Shayla.
“What you so serious about today, anyway?”
Stevon shrugged. “On my way to work today, on Old Hope Road, I this girl that I used to know from Campion College. She was really smart- brilliant, actually- but she was selling fruit on the side of the road. Like she never went anywhere with her life.”
“Jamaica give nuff people a hard time,” Everton agreed, “Though I wouldn’t have thought that anyone from your school would end up a higgler.”
“Yeah,” Stevon said with a sigh. “She had to leave Campion in fourth form because she got pregnant.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Got kicked out of school.”
“Well, then, that explains it.”
Stevon smashed his peas into his fork.
“I got something here that will cheer you up,” Everton said, taking a brown manila envelope out of his bag. “It’s the billboard and newspaper ad for Jamaica AIDS Support’s new campaign that I was telling you about.” Everton opened the envelope, took out a document, and slid it across the table.
Stevon wiped his hands and picked it up. Everton was sitting on a bed, shirtless and leaning forward with a thoughtful expression on his face, his waist-length dreadlocks pulled back into a loose ponytail. Next to him, but in the background of the ad, there was a beautiful woman in what appeared to be a slip, though it was hard to tell. He was holding a condom, still in the package, in his hand. “REAL MEN USE CONDOMS” was writing across the bottom.
Stevon smiled. Everton was the perfect cover model for the campaign: muscular, handsome, self-confident, and undeniably straight. “I like it. You have a lot of balls to volunteer for these ads.”
“Well, with all that they’ve done for my mother, I couldn’t say no.”
“How is she doing?”
“Much better, now that she has medication. But she still doesn’t want anyone to know, so don’t go talking about it.”
“No need to worry about that. But how are you going to explain your modeling career to everyone else?”
Everton smiled his toothpaste-commercial-quality smile. “If it’s a guy, I just use it as a little education opportunity and offer him a free magnum. But I have the perfect line for any girl who asks me about it.”
“And what is that?”
“Yes, that’s me on that billboard. I believe that it’s important to practice safe sex. Want to practice?”
Stevon couldn’t help but laugh. “It took you weeks to think that one up, didn’t it?”
“Think it will work?”
“I think you could get a girl through pantomime if you wanted.”
Everton smiled like he knew it. “So they’re unveiling the ads this Friday night at their annual art auction, and I was wondering if you wanted to come with.”
“You don’t have a girl to bring along?”
“I got my eye on a few that will be there, but I don’t want to tie myself down by arriving with one. You should see the new Peace Corps volunteer.” Everton whistled. “You and I both start work at midnight, so afterwards you can give me a ride to the hospital in exchange for the complimentary ticket that I’m offering you.”
“Ah, that’s your motive.”
“Well, I’m also trying to lure another doctor into the volunteer community. There will be wine and cheesecake. And hot altruistic girls that you’ll refuse to look at because you’re engaged.”
Stevon laughed. “Alright, I’ll go. I’m doing it for the cause, not the girls. And maybe for the cheesecake.”
“Sure, Doc,” Everton said. He looked at Stevon’s half-eaten plate of food. “You going to eat that?”
Stevon slid over his plate. “Go ahead.” Everton had gotten his mind off of Shayla for a short time, but he still had no appetite.

Stevon enjoyed driving home at midnight, as it was one of the few times when the route from Crossroads to Papine was not full of traffic. It was a slightly more dangerous time to be out on the road, but he made sure to keep the windows rolled up and the doors locked. Besides, the only time that he had been robbed had been in the middle of the day as he was walking down the street in New Kingston, the uptown business district, in plain view of the traffic around him. No one had intervened as he dutifully handed his wallet to the man with the gun.
The only bad part about driving home at midnight was that he missed the spectacular scenery once he drove past Papine and into the Blue Mountains. The lush, perpetual greenness never failed to impress him. The towering mountain range just seemed like a block of green from afar, but once he began driving up the winding road he could make out the individual trees, ferns, and bamboo plants that had always looked like giant tufts of green dreadlocks to him. A closer look revealed other colors as well: flowers of all shapes and sizes and the mango, orange, and Jamaican apple trees that dropped their abundant fruit onto the road during their respective seasons. Even when it was too dark for a good view, he could feel the change in the environment as he drove further away from Kingston. The suffocating heat and pollution disappeared, and he turned off the air conditioner and rolled down the window to let in the relatively cool, fresh air. The business and tension of the capitol city was replaced by the calm of the country. Any thoughts about moving back to the United States escaped him by the end of his forty-minute drive to Irish Town.
He pulled up into the driveway of his house. His parents had given him an interest-free loan, out of their own personal savings, a few weeks ago so that he could buy the three-bedroom house, which overlooked a spectacular view of the valley and river from his front windows and the Blue Mountains from his back windows. He had been planning to rent an apartment in Kingston until Jade arrived, but his parents had talked him into buying. He suspected that they hoped that the beautiful house would keep him and Jade in Jamaica. Despite the fact that his brothers and all of their relatives had left for England and the United States, his parents still loved their home country.
Though he appreciated the house and the view, the large rooms seemed too empty without Jade around. They would be together again in June, after she finished her Master’s thesis and wrapped up all of the loose ends in New York. They would get married at the Ritz Carlton in Montego Bay, at a wedding that had already slipped out of both of their control and into the demanding hands of his mother. Stevon didn’t really care about the wedding as long as they would be back together. Six months had not seemed like a very long time when he said goodbye to her after Christmas, but the empty house made June seem very far away. That night, however, it wasn’t Jade that he thought about when he went to bed. Instead, the image of a worn-down and tired Shayla, pregnant and selling fruit on the street, wove around and around his mind until he fell into a restless sleep.