payment page
Summary: Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield
Opal works for the Postal Service as a mail carrier. When she delivers mail, she starts with the odd-numbered side of the street first. This is one of a series of superstitions she holds to, to offset all of the unpleasant events from her life (Ronald, Alcatraz, her mother, group homes and foster care). Opal knows she didn’t cause any of the tragedies in her life, but feels that she must’ve deserved them nonetheless. Her superstitious rituals, such as stepping over cracks and knocking on wood, give her a sense of control.
Opal regularly searches her adopted grandsons’ phones while they are sleeping. She found a video of Orvil, her oldest grandson, doing a powwow dance in the Native American regalia from her closet. The regalia is from Lucas (Dene’s uncle), whom she met at a group home when she was younger. Lucas and Opal were in love before Lucas suddenly left for Los Angeles without telling her. He came back twenty years later to film an interview for his documentary and gave her the regalia they made together.
When Orvil told Opal about the spider legs in his leg, she remembered the time that she also found spider legs in a lump in her leg. It was soon after her mother died, while she and Jacquie lived with Ronald. Ronald came to the girls’ room and started touching Jacquie while she was sleeping. Opal hit him in the head with a baseball bat, and the two girls ran away to a shelter. A year later, Jacquie disappeared from Opal’s life when she was arrested for an unknown reason.
For a long time, Opal wondered if she had killed Ronald, and this weighed heavily on her conscience. One day, she Opal told Lucas everything about her life, including what she did to Ronald. Opal and Lucas decided to go to Ronald’s house to see if he was alive. They waited for several hours, then Ronald pulled up and walked the stairs into his home. Opal felt conflicted: she was relieved that she had not killed him, but was also upset that Ronald was still alive.
Back in the present, Opal is delivering mail when a pit bull with no collar or leash growls at her. She is scared, not just for herself, but for her three grandsons who would have nowhere to go if she were killed. The dog’s owner appears and calls the dog. Opal recognizes how the dog flinches at the sound of its name from years of abuse. Opal gets in her mail truck and drives away.
Summary: Octavio Gomez
Octavio rides his bike home to his grandma Josefina’s house. He feels very sick, so Josefina puts him to bed. She asks him if he knows anything about curses. Josefina’s own father cursed her when she was eighteen years old after he found out that she was pregnant and had no plans to keep the baby or marry the baby’s father. Josefina’s father put a braid of hair under her bed as a talisman, and then her mother made Josefina move out of their house. Josefina got an abortion when she arrived in Oakland, then became sick. This sickness lasted for a year, and Josefina thought it was a result of her father’s curse.
Octavio remembers his father’s death. Octavio’s older brother, Junior, and his uncle Sixto had stolen drugs. The people that they stole from shot up Octavio’s house, killing his father. Per Josefina’s suggestion, Octavio started spending time with his cousins Daniel and Manny. Octavio witnessed his cousins’ abuse at the hands of their father. One night when they discovered Daniel and Manny’s father beating their mother, Manny fought his father, slamming him on their glass table. When his father went unconscious, Manny and Octavio dropped him off at the door of the hospital and drove away.
After the fight between Manny and his father, Octavio spent more time with his cousins. One day, Manny and Octavio went to downtown Oakland and stole a car. Octavio marveled at how easy it was to get away with theft in plain sight. Back at his cousins’ house, Octavio received a call from Josefina who said Uncle Sixto was driving drunk and got into an accident that killed Junior and Octavio’s mother. Sixto was sent to jail, but got out with just a DUI. Josefina warned Octavio not to visit Sixto and get revenge.
Octavio went to Sixto’s house anyway, planning to beat him up after getting him drunk. Sixto let Octavio into his house, and after speaking with Sixto, Octavio recognized how badly Sixto felt about accidentally killing Junior and Octavio’s mother They drank for a while and Sixto took Octavio to the basement and showed him his medicine box. He completed some sort of ceremony, lighting a plant and blowing a handful of powder into Octavio’s face. Octavio immediately felt ill and went home to Josefina’s.
Josefina drives Octavio out to a field and catches a badger. She makes Octavio grab a handful of its fur so that he can make his own medicine box. She tells him that he will need to learn to stay deep inside himself and ignore any feelings that he is “something wrong.” When Octavio tells her that he does not know what he should do and he cannot get his family members back, Josefina replies that he is not supposed to know such things.
Analysis
The chapters in Return are less unified in terms of their themes than those in Reclaim. Some show characters returning to places from which they have been distanced or to memories that they have forgotten or people they have lost. Others, however, explore possible financial return, or gain, from an activity, like robbing the powwow. Orange also connects the larger idea of a return to the novel’s ongoing interest in stories, particularly when Opal hits the man assaulting Jacquie with a baseball bat on which the word “Storey” is engraved. The danger of a “Storey” is given an ironic twist, and in these chapters, the sisters return to see what the outcome of the Storey’s story might be.
The shift from Opal, one of the novel’s key characters, to Octavio, its chief villain, is as jarring as the chapter is chaotic. Orange communicates the chaos of his world with a first-person narrative that shifts abruptly between traumatic events, creating a picture of abuse and violence that leave the young man scarred. While some of the characters are part of a household or family group, like Edwin and Bill or Opal and Jacquie, Octavio is only linked to his cousin Manny. Both in terms of the chapter’s form and its content, then, it is much harder to follow than others in There There. Octavio’s worry that he is cursed approaches the idea of “return” from a different angle. A curse is an evil or misfortune that pursues a person or group, reappearing with some regularity. Like Tony, Octavio worries that there is something inherently wrong with him. As the chapter shows, though, the actions a person takes to escape a curse may paradoxically bring it into existence. A curse is yet another kind of story, but the actions taken when Octavio believes in a curse can have lethal implications.
