Read Online Left at the Mango Tree by Stephanie Siciarz - Free Book Online Page B

believe she didn’t see the truth?) and admitted to only the unmentionable (though they mentioned little else), some trickery on the part of Edda. Among these were Bang, Cougar, and Nat, believe it or not. They believed in Gustave’s magic, too, they certainly did; but they knew Edda, they practically raised her after all, and suspected that in this case their little dumpling might be hiding some spice between the folds. They would never have fessed up to such feelings in front of Raoul, of course. As far as he knew, they were staunch supporters of the magic faction and defenders of his little dumpling’s honor.
    Raoul’s sympathies lay somewhere in between. He didn’t for a minute doubt his daughter’s word. But magic? Raoul couldn’t stomach such a shady truth as that. He wanted an answer that was as clear as a nose on a face. And when he looked
this
matter square in the face, nothing was clear at all. I was his grandchild, and I was an Orlean, there was no doubting that. Raoul had watched my mother swell and bloat and pucker in the months preceding my arrival, and Abigail, the island’s most practiced midwife, had herself delivered me—Miss Almondine Orlean (I was given my mother’s family name, which she kept after marriage, Oh not being completely devoid of modern tendencies). Yet when Raoul looked into my eyes, his own didn’t stare back at him the way they did when he looked into Edda’s. In place of Raoul’s dark, black Orlean eyes, I (“pale little creature”) had red Vilder globes.
    The first time Raoul peered into my face, he forgot where he was and what he was doing, like the first thick seconds that cloud a still-sleepy mind as the body awakes from a nap. When his mind caught up with his limbs and tried to verify the surroundings, the bedroom window’s darned curtain and the mint-green coverlet onthe mattress, it recognized nothing at all. My face should have been a mirror to Raoul’s heart, but in it his reflection was haunted, at once familiar and foreign—an abrupt and glowing consciousness that we are more, or less, than we think we are.
    So Raoul decided then and there that, if no answers were to be found in my face, then perhaps one as clear as a nose could be gleaned or gotten from Gustave’s. Gustave had twice left word for Raoul in the week before my birth that the two men needed to talk. Once at the airport and once at the Belly. But Raoul, who had little regard for Gustave Vilder, had been too busy to bother with either message. Gustave must have wanted to come clean all along! So days after I came into the world, Raoul finally left for Gustave’s dwelling, and a chat.
    Gustave lived on the westernmost shore of the island, on the land where the comfortable shack with the daffodil curtains and his heart-poking mother once stood. A small, simple villa stood there now, for thanks to Miss Peacock and the girls of the seedy port bar, Gustave had found the power to make something more of himself than the slouch-shouldered family legacy had dictated he should be. He had gotten himself hired by Puymute, who paid well, and finagled himself a loan from the bank, where the manager feared him too much to refuse. And he had built himself a house with indoor plumbing.
    A house, but not quite a home. For it lacked a woman’s touch, or at least the touch of someone other than Gustave Vilder. Despite its bright colors, its wispy fabrics, and the sun that pounded it most of the day, the small, simple villa was a thick and shaded place, where even the welcoming froth of the sugared coffee proffered in the most expensive cups to be had at the market was disagreeable.
    When Raoul reached the jagged fence of thick twigs that wrapped itself around the house, he could barely hear for all the noise in his head.
    Flies.
    The whole way there he had pondered what Gustave would say to him, what explanation Gustave would give, and every hypothesis was a buzz in his brain. They mingled in there and clashed and