Yesterday's Dreams
an excerpt

Yesterday's Dreams

Chapter 1
Stevon saw Shayla for the first time in ten years through his rearview mirror on Trafalgar 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, they now led different lives. But this time, as he looked more closely, she still looked like Shayla. She was pregnant. This should not have been that surprising- she was 25 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. He knew it was her, but it wasn’t the same girl he had fallen in love with back in fourth form. 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. It was a spontaneous reaction. He rolled down the window. The sticky, languid summer heat immediately began to gush into his 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.
“No,” he said dumbly. “How are you?” he asked finally.
“Not as good as you,” she said softly. She looked back up at him. “You’re a doctor now.”
Stevon looked puzzled for a few seconds before he remembered that he was wearing his scrubs. “Yes,” he said.
“I always knew you would be,” Shayla said.
Stevon wanted to say that he never thought Shayla would be selling fruit on the street, but he held the words back.
Shayla filled the silence. “You want June plums?” she asked, holding up the bag.
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 a Manley,” 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. Then, as quickly as it came it was gone, replaced with the same tired and worn expression she had before. “Thanks,” she said softly, crushing the bill in her fist. “Wait!” she exclaimed. She went running back to the sidewalk, where her box of fruit sat. The light turned green as she ran back and handed two more bags of plums to him. “They make a nice juice,” she said. As he took the plums from her, the cars behind him began honking loudly.
“Thanks,” he said. He threw the bags 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, Stevon could not get Shayla out of his mind. He hadn't spoken to her since she had left Campion, but he had never really stopped thinking about her.
He was still deep in his thoughts about Shayla when he arrived at the hospital. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath before his shift began, willing away all of the thoughts from his brain that did not have to do with work. The full emergency room kept his mind off of Shayla, but as soon as he stopped working that image of her, pregnant, selling fruit along the side of the road popped right back up, as if his mind was a TV screen that someone had just put on pause.
He went to the hospital cafeteria for dinner with his friend Everton, an emergency medical technician. They had become good friends despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that they were opposites in many ways. They had been eating dinner together since Stevon had been assigned to Everton's shift, noon to midnight, a few months ago, right after Stevon finished his residency. They got their usual fare: chicken, rice, and peas, and sat down. Everton hungrily scooped up huge forkfuls of food, but Stevon had trouble getting anything past the lump in his throat.
“You okay, 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 alright,” he said with a sigh.
“Still thinking about Jade?” Everton asked.
Stevon shrugged, looking down at his chicken drumstick.
“Jade was a nice-looking girl, but you can find an even nicer one no problem. You one of the most eligible bachelors in Jamaica: you're a doctor, you never lose your temper, and you always respect women. I know about ten women who would love to have you,” said Everton.
“I know, you’ve told me this before,” said Stevon. “And the answer is still that I’ll think about it.” He slowly stirred the gravy into his rice and peas.
“Still don’t trust me to find you a good woman, do you?” he asked playfully.
Stevon didn’t return his smile. “I wasn't thinking about Jade.”
“No?” Everton asked. He looked up from his food and leaned forward. “You didn’t just get burned by another woman that you hadn’t told me about, did you?”
“No. Nothing recent. On my way to work today, on Trafalgar Road, near where the line starts for the British Embassy, I saw my old girlfriend from Campion College. She looked bad.”
“She get ugly?” Everton asked, interested.
“No, not ugly. In a sense, she still looks good. But she looked so tired, and hopeless. She was walking up and down in the sun, selling fruit on the street. I never really knew what happened to her, but it had never even occurred to me that she wouldn’t have passed her exams and gone back to school,” he said.
“I thought that everyone at that uptown super-competitive school of yours passed their exams,” said Everton.
“Yeah, she would have, no problem. But she had to leave school in third form.”
“Why?” asked Everton, leaning toward Stevon with interest.
“She got pregnant.”
“Rahtid! You made a fourteen-year-old girl pregnant?” Everton looked at his incredulously. “Even me myself never did that.”
“No,” Stevon said, painfully. He stared at the table. “It wasn't me.”
Everton nodded. “That makes more sense, but that is tough to take. Who was it?”
“I don't know. She wouldn't tell me.”
“Sounds like she was cheating on you, then,” Everton said.
“That’s what a lot of people said. But there was something very wrong about the whole situation. She had definitely made it a point to tell me that she was not going to have sex until she finished high school. And she was always complaining about how teenage girls in her community had babies and how nobody used birth control or condoms and that was what was keeping Jamaica down. She was not someone who was going to fall into that trap.”
“And you put up with that nonsense?” Stevon said jokingly.
“You didn’t know me in high school. I was scared to try any of that stuff myself until fifth form anyway.” Stevon said seriously.
“I was just kidding,” Everton said. “But what community was she from?”
“August Town.”
Everton dropped his fork, which had been halfway to his mouth, back onto his plate. “You had a girlfriend from August Town? That place makes any other ghetto community look calm. Even I won’t go there.”
Stevon nodded. “Shayla wasn't planning to spend her life there. Some days, when she didn't have bus fare, she would walk all the way from August Town to Campion- it must be about four miles, in the sun. She spent most of third form trying to decide if she was going to be a scientist, an author, or the Prime Minister. She could have been all three.” The words came out slowly, painfully. Stevon pushed his plate away, no longer interested in even trying to eat.
“Except she got pregnant in third form, and you never even had sex with her.”
“Yeah,” Stevon said softly. “But I think- and I’ve always thought- that what happened to her in third form might not have been consensual.”
“Did she ever say that?” Everton challenged.
“No. But with the way that she wouldn't talk about it, the way she got so quiet and withdrawn, and she didn't tell anyone about it for so many months, it just seems like there was something going on that she couldn't talk about. But she never gave me an explanation, so I have no way of knowing.” Stevon spoke softly and looked away from Everton, suddenly very interested in the loose threads in the right sleeve of his scrubs.
“If she didn't say anything to you then she was probably cheating on you. Maybe she was trying to get money for her school fee or something.”
“That’s what my parents said, but I just can’t believe that,” he said.
“It reminds me of a saying,” Everton said. “You can take the girl out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of the girl.”
“Don’t say that!” Stevon protested, louder than he had planned. He noticed a few people from other tables looking over and lowered his voice. “You can’t just label her like that when you’ve never even met her. Shayla was different.”
“Hey, I’m sorry,” Everton said. He could tell that he was straining to sound sympathetic. “But come on. You two dated each other ten years ago, she’s already got at least one baby- probably a few by now- and she’s pregnant again. Obviously, it wasn’t meant to be.”
Stevon stared down at his plate, saying nothing.
“I'm guessing that you're just feeling emotional after what happened with Jade. Shayla and Jade both made their own mistakes by giving away one the most eligible bachelor in the whole of Jamaica. They're not worth thinking about anymore. What you need is a new woman. I know a few nice ones who would love to have a doctor.”
“No thanks, Everton, I'm not ready for another relationship.”
“Who said anything about a relationship? I'm just talking about sex. I keep telling you, if you'd only throw around the words 'doctor' and 'money' a little more often, you could have any woman that you wanted.”
“We're not having this discussion again,” Stevon said, mildly annoyed.
“Alright, I won't go there,” he said, sensing Stevon's annoyance. “But how long now since the last time you saw Jade?”
“Over a year since I last saw her. Six months since she sent me that text message.”
Everton looked at him incredulously. “Don't tell me you haven’t had sex that whole time?”
Stevon averted his eyes and found the clock on the wall behind Everton. “It's almost 7:00PM, we should get back to work.”
“No wonder you’re going mad with memories of a girl from ten years ago. You just need some good exercise.”
Stevon picked up his tray and brought it to the counter, ignoring the comment. Everton followed after him. “Alright, alright Stevon, I’ll leave you alone about it. But are you going be able to keep your mind on your work with all of these thoughts running through your head?”
“Did I look distracted this afternoon?” Stevon asked, concerned.
“No, you never look distracted while you're working.”
“Then I'll be fine,” Stevon answered firmly.
“Your work fine, but your bed need a woman,” Everton muttered as they walked back into the Emergency Room. Stevon ignored the comment.

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 at gunpoint 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. Though he had lived there for two years now, 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 red, orange, yellow, and green mangoes that loaded down the trees and dropped their abundant fruit onto the road. Stevon had often wondered if there was a way to time the summer mango season so that they didn't all ripen at once and then lie rotting in the road, but he had never figured out a solution. 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 calmness of the country. Any thoughts about moving to the United States, like two of his brothers had done, escaped him by the end of his forty-minute drive to Irish Town.
He pulled up into the driveway of house. His parents had given him an interest-free loan, out of their own personal savings, a couple of years earlier so that he could buy the refurbished three-bedroom colonial-style house, which overlooked a spectacular view of the valley and river to his right and the peaks of the mountain range on his left. He had felt embarrassed taking a loan from his parents, but he could never handle the interest rates that the bank had tried to impose on him. And he had loved the house too much to risk someone else bidding on it while he tried to save his own money. In the past couple of weeks, though, it had grown much too big for his liking. The empty rooms taunted his loneliness.