We Rip the World Apart

Evelyn Toronto

Evelyn

Toronto

2005

Even after all these years, the terminal still felt like a city. Enclosed. Futuristic. Too large to be an airport. Too sterile to be anything but a place of passing. Evelyn placed one hand on Kingsley’s shoulder, the other on Kareela’s. Her daughter’s eyes were wide, her head swiveling back and forth, her hands pressed up against the glass, watching the jets taxi in and out.

“Is that Granny’s plane? How about that one?”

The hustle of the airport, the crush of bodies, put Evelyn on edge. What must it be like for Violet, this airport so different from the place where she walked across the tarmac, took movable steps, rather than a jetway, into the plane? The memory of Evelyn’s opposite journey years ago eased into her mind, the hot balmy air such a contrast to the frigid wind she’d left in Ontario. Eighteen, and never so far from home. She’d been scared, but eager. Full of hope for this new life. And then there was Kingsley, a volunteer driver for the Red Cross, holding a sign, his smile buoyant. A flurry in her stomach seemed to say, him .

His swagger, suaveness, was something she’d only seen on the silver screen, and as a result, his slight accent was less of a surprise than it should have been. He reached out his hand, and it lingered around hers. The intimacy of their touch converting that flurry to an electrical current.

“When will Granny be here?” Kareela stepped away from the glass, a pout on her lips.

Evelyn gave a sharp inhale, shocked out of her reverie.

“Soon.” Kingsley placed his hand on Kareela’s head with a tenderness Evelyn herself hadn’t felt in months. He pointed at a screen to the left of them. “Her plane has landed. It’ll be any minute.” He stood tall, his shoulders back, his chin lifted, the way it used to. “Let’s go over there and wait.”

“I hardly know my mother,” he’d told Evelyn after their first time together, as they lay in the sheets, covered in residual sweat, the faint breeze through the window a soft caress. “I left her when I was eight.”

“Left?”

“Was taken.” Kingsley rolled onto his back, one hand resting on her bare stomach. After lovemaking, she later learned, was the only time he’d speak about his past. “My father came one day.” His voice was soft in the dark room. “I hadn’t seen him in several years. He took me. Just me. Hardly looked at my sisters beyond a pat on the head. Said I was going to the city to be a man. To better myself, the family.”

Kingsley had lain silent while Evelyn waited for more. In future moments of intimacy, she’d learned about the death of Femi. Of Chevelle, how she was never quite right, and no one knew why, but he loved her anyway, loved her more, maybe, because of it. Of how difficult it had been, being torn away from her like that—from Ella, his mother, everything and everyone he knew. A country boy in the city, in uniform, in a proper all-boys school, with rules and ways of speech that seemed foreign. Without the only family he’d known—his mother, sisters, cousins, aunts. A boy in a world of women, suddenly in a world of men.

In the terminal, Kareela stepped forward as dark-skinned passengers came their way, the colors they wore as bright as their smiles.

“We need you,” Evelyn had said when she called Violet. “Kingsley and Kareela need you.”

“In a month,” Violet said. The tourist season was coming to a close. Her cousin could manage the shop. She’d come. For one month, two maybe, if they needed her that long. “How yuh doing?” she’d asked at Evelyn’s silence, the lilt of her voice pulling back to over twenty-four years in the past when, seeing Evelyn sleep-deprived and at a loss, Violet had asked the same question, became the mother Evelyn had lost too soon.

“I—” Evelyn faltered. “I need you, too. For as long as you can stay.”

“Me ah gonna come,” said Violet. “Soon as me can. For as long as me can.” She’d paused, the silence stretching in the miles between them, Evelyn gripping the phone, wishing she could step right through it, emerge on the other side. “It hard in a way nothin can prepare yuh for. But de sun still rises.”

Today, Kareela rushed forward. “Granny!” she cried. Kingsley grasped Evelyn’s hand—the movement so unfamiliar now it sent a surge of hope through her. She looked at him, offered a smile. He waited while the old woman and young girl embraced, then dropped Evelyn’s hand to step into his mother’s arms. After several breaths, Violet stepped away from her son and turned to Evelyn. Evelyn sank into her arms, a small portion of the weight she’d been carrying seeming to slip aside.

“Me here for yuh, girl,” Violet whispered. “Me here, now.”