Winter in Paradise (Paradise #1)(81)
Maia liked that idea enormously. Her mother was alive inside of her. Maia was her own person, but she was also a continuation of Rosie.
“But don’t put pressure on yourself to be perfect in order to make your mother proud,” Julie said. She lifted Maia’s chin and gave her a very nice smile. “I assure you, Maia Small, your mother was proud of you every single second of every single day, just for being you.”
Maia has never been religious, but now it’s helpful to imagine her mother and her grandmother in the sky, in a place Maia thinks of as heaven, where they lie back on chaise longues, like the ones they used to relax in on Gibney Beach. Maia’s grandmother, LeeAnn, was friends with Mrs. Gibney, and she was allowed to sit in the shade in front of the Gibney cottages whenever she wanted.
“I hope heaven looks like this,” LeeAnn used to say. White sand, flat, clear turquoise water, the hill of Hawksnest and Carval Rock in the distance.
When Maia can keep her mother and grandmother in those chaises in the sky, watching over her, cheering her on, keeping her safe, then she can move—nearly seamlessly—through her days.
She tries to remember her mother in full, fleshy detail, because one of the things she has heard is that once people die, they fade from memory and become more of an idea than a person. Maia and her mother were so connected, so attached, that Maia can’t imagine forgetting her, but she replays certain moments and images again and again, just in case.
Her mother was beautiful—short, trim, perfectly proportioned. She had cocoa skin, darker than Maia’s, and a flash of orange in her brown eyes, which caused people to stare. Her eyes were arresting, Russ said once, meaning they made you stop. Maia didn’t inherit the orange; her eyes are regular dark brown like her grandmother’s. LeeAnn claimed the orange was a Small trait—it meant fire, and the fire meant trouble.
Rosie worked four evenings a week at La Tapa. She was a great server, the kind returning guests requested when they called to make their reservations. Having dinner at La Tapa wasn’t enough of a tradition; they had to have dinner at La Tapa with Rosie as their server—otherwise their trip wasn’t complete. Rosie knew a lot about wine and even more about food, and she liked to hang out with the kitchen crew to see how they prepared things. Rosie was a really, really good cook, and at home she made mostly Caribbean food, recipes she had learned from LeeAnn and that LeeAnn had learned from her mother—conch stew, jerk chicken, Creole shrimp over rice. She put peas in her pasta salad and raisins in her coleslaw just like everyone else in St. John, but Rosie’s versions of these dishes were better because she added a teaspoon of sugar.
Maia is old enough to wonder if her mother had aspirations. She sometimes talked about opening a food truck, but she thought it would be too much work. More than anything in the world, Maia knows, her mother had been passionate about the Virgin Islands—the USVI and the BVI—and when she was working at La Tapa, she was always giving people at her tables excellent tips, such as go to the floating bar, Angel’s Rest, in the East End; don’t miss the lobster at the Lime Inn; there’s yoga on the beach at Cinnamon and a really cool church service on the beach at Hawksnest. She could have been a tour guide, Maia thinks, or a yoga instructor, or owned a food truck, but Rosie had lacked ambition, whereas Maia has ambition to spare. She will need two or three lifetimes to reach all of her goals. Maia doesn’t like to think badly about her mother, though, so instead of believing her mother lacked something, she has decided to categorize her mother as content. She was so happy with her life—in love with Russ, absorbed with Maia, good at her job, and living in a place she adored, with friends everywhere she turned—that she had no reason to make any changes.
Maia tells Huck about her plan for a memorial ceremony out on the water, in the place the bird went down, and he agrees, as she knew he would. Huck has always been Maia’s favorite. Her mother and grandmother loved her because they had to. Huck loves her because he wants to.
Originally, she was only going to honor Rosie, but at the last minute, she chose a bath bomb for Russ as well.
Maia’s feelings about Russ are mixed. She first remembers him as the man with the lollipops—flat, oval Charms pops, strawberry, Maia’s favorite. Then Maia remembers him teaching her to swim at their private beach. Then, when she was nine, he let her decorate her room in his house however she wanted. But there was a part of Russ that made Maia uneasy. He didn’t stay on St. John; he came and went. When he came, Maia’s mother was happy—ecstatic, even. Impossible to bring down! And when Russ left, Rosie was devastated. It broke her every time, she said, and the leaving, the worrying that he would never be back, never got any easier.
Normally when he came, Rosie and Maia went to his villa. They swam in the pool or at the beach, they ate at the house—food Mama fixed or that Miss Paulette dropped off from different restaurants. Russ liked the lobster tempura from Rhumb Lines and the key lime chiffon pie from Morgan’s Mango. They read books and watched movies and played shuffleboard. But they didn’t go anywhere, and once they returned to their own lives, to the house where they lived with Huck, Maia wasn’t allowed to talk about Russ or the villa at all. She had heard Huck and other people refer to Russ as the Invisible Man, and it did sometimes seem to Maia that Russ only existed for Rosie and Maia. It was as if they and Miss Paulette and her husband, Douglas, and the man who came to do the landscaping and service the pool, were the only people who could see him. Maia wondered how Russ got on and off the island. Did he take the ferry, like everyone else? It seemed inconceivable. Maia had asked her mother, and Rosie had said, “Sometimes he takes the ferry, yes. Sometimes he flies in a helicopter. Sometimes his business associates pick him up by boat down on the beach.” The helicopter and the private boat sounded reasonable; Maia could not imagine Russ waiting in line at the ferry dock, or sitting on the top deck, the way Maia liked to, or disembarking in Red Hook. She thought Rosie was trying to make Russ seem like a normal person, when it was quite obvious to Maia that he was not.