Five Years Later
Marcus came home to Kingston for good on a Thursday in June, two weeks after his university graduation ceremony, with a degree in education and a duffel bag and a heart full of things he was ready to put to work.
He had a job lined up teacher of English at a secondary school in Kingston that served children from yards like the one he'd grown up in, He had spent three years of university working toward this specifically driven by something he hadn't fully understood until his final year the clearest purpose he'd ever felt to be, for some boy sitting at the back of a classroom wondering if any of this was meant for him what Mr Okafor had been for Marcus.
Diane was at the airport again but this time they came out of the arrivals hall and there was no taxi, just the street and she was standing in it in the warm morning light and she looked exactly right not smaller Just exactly the right size, in the right place.
He handed her his degree certificate framed in a flat package he had carried as hand luggage.
She looked at it for a long time.
Marcus Elijah Campbell she read softly bachelor of Education. First Class Honours.
I told you I'd come back with something, he said.
She looked up at him her eyes were dry of course they were.
You came back, she said. That's the something.
That evening, the yard gathered the way yards gather for important things people appearing in doorways, chairs materializing from inside, Leroy arriving with his wide laugh and his family around him like a weather system They ate they talked Marcus sat in the warm dark with the people who had made him and felt the world settle into itself.
Later, after most people had gone inside, he went to the mango tree.
He was too big for it now technically, But the third branch held him He sat in it and looked out over the rooftops, the same view he had memorized at nine years old, the same mountains going blue and distant in the evening, The same dogs somewhere to the east the same warm air.
He had not forgotten any of it.
Not one day.
He sat in the tree for a long time, looking at the city that had made him thinking about all the boys like him sitting in mango trees right now, or on the backs of walls or in cold bus stops far from home who needed to know that the distance wasn't defeat, That what you were learning out there was for bringing back.
That you could leave and return and be larger for both.
Above him the Kingston sky did what it had done the morning he was born it turned colours that old Mama Vie would have called a sign, Gold and copper and that particular impossible violet.
He sat in it and let it paint him.
He was home.