Iph thinks of Orr’s favorite childhood version of Pinocchio, the illustrations done with photographs of puppets. In the scene where the puppet maker/father figure, Geppetto, is stranded inside a whale, there is a whole living room. A table. A lamp. There, he mourns the loss of Pinocchio. Maybe Dad is doing that now—drinking whiskey, the empty house sighing around him.
“Sit tight,” George says, a little louder but still conscious of volume. Scout’s nails click against the floor. Iph peels off her shoes: pain, then pleasure. Or maybe just relief. They are so similar, she thinks, in the same way pain is caught up with want. Scout is at her feet sniffing her injuries, offering a soft lick. George is moving around the room. Spots of light bloom in the darkness as George turns on a series of flashlights that beam toward the high ceiling, tracing the shape of the empty garage.
“No trucks?”
“Not anymore,” George says. “Sold to pay the property tax. My nana left this place to me. Some people in my family think that isn’t fair. They want to, like, ‘help out’ and ‘run the business’ till I’m an adult.” George’s air quotes say it all. “My stepdad’s in charge of the estate. Tells you something that it wasn’t anyone blood-related. Anyway, he mostly got them off my case before he went back to Iraq. Now I’m sitting here waiting to turn eighteen.”
George is like Mom, Iph realizes. A complicated history and a lot under lock and key. The flip side to this amazing place is that George lives here alone and in secret with no adults around to help—and still rides around at night, helping other people. Iph’s stomach does a disappointed-in-herself drop. That’s the problem with being young. You’re immature, insufferable. And then you realize it and think, Why? How could I be that self-absorbed?
“So, um . . . welcome to my humble abode?” George says.
There’s a hay bale with a canvas bull’s-eye target stuck to it in the corner and a tire swing hooked to the rafters by a stout rope. In the other corner is a hammock. “Scored it on the street,” George says. “And uh, maybe you want to turn around. One sec, I’ll grab you a flashlight.”
Iph turns back to the garage door. It’s completely covered in painted images. “Oh!” She covers her mouth as the syllable bounces around the room, her flashlight illuminating a nearly life-size painting of George as both twins in Gemini, one with waist-length hair, the other with a short-cropped buzz. There are birds and flowers and animals, mythical and real. Trees. Constellations.
Iph moves closer to the Gemini twins, tracing the clasped hands of the two figures with her index finger. “It reminds me of this painting . . .”
“The Two Fridas?”
“Yes! I love Frida Kahlo,” Iph says.
“Me, too. I call mine George and Georgina.”
Touching the long-haired figure, Iph wonders if this is how George once looked. “Are you still both?” Iph asks, hoping it’s not the wrong thing to say. “Or just George?”
“Good question,” George says.
Iph moves the flashlight across the art-covered walls. There’s a sort of cubist rendering of Scout chasing a squirrel that makes her laugh. A bear as high as the warehouse ceiling with its arms open to catch a school of starry fish. A figure—half man, half badger—holding a machine gun. An old woman in a sky-colored kimono flying with a great blue heron. Iph pauses again, this time at a large portrait of a naked blonde girl holding a golden apple. “Who’s this?”
“This?” The word is a soliloquy of unrequited feeling. It is a perfect example of Iph’s favorite thing: a true reveal. It’s a Santos Velos term, something Mom and Dad made up to describe their favorite element in all kinds of art. A building could have a reveal. Or a dance, a play. A song. It starts with a particular kind of noticing. This heightened attention, Dad says, is performed by the noticer but initiated by the art itself, like a siren song calling you to see it. The true reveal is the moment you heed the call and slip into the artist’s secret world.
Iph’s brain goes where it usually does—she’s onstage in London playing Antigone and whips out the sound of longing George has jammed into the tiny throwaway word about the girl in the painting. The theater is silent and electric, but . . . no. Iph shakes it off. The play dissolves. She might write a play with a moment like that, even direct one, but star in one? Not likely.
Last year, when she fired all her fake theater friends, she resolved to stop wanting the things she’d never get. The world is what it is, and Iph is what she is—medium height, medium brown with bombshell boobs and a butt that hasn’t fit into a single-digit dress size since she was eleven. Since puberty, she has been the girl with “such a pretty face,” a red pouty mouth and big brown eyes and Mom’s skin and Dad’s ridiculous lashes. Even she can admit to liking her freckles, and her cheekbones are legitimately great. Sometimes, if she is brave, she lets herself look in the mirror after a candlelit bath and see herself as beautiful. If this were the Renaissance and she could learn to sit still, she’d have a promising career as an artist’s model. But it’s not. Models today look like the girl on the garage door—slender, with high breasts and sculpted abs and thin, waifish limbs. She traces the golden apple with her finger. “I thought it was the snake who tempted Eve, not the other way around.”
“Oh!” George’s eyes open wide. “I never knew why I painted her like that. You might be onto something.”
Iph is silent, waiting for more about the girl. It doesn’t come. “So,” she asks, “what are the rules of this lost-boy hideout, please?”
George grins. “The governing principle is to avoid detection.”
“Who’s detecting us?”
“Pirates. Grown-ups. The tricks are few. We come in late and leave when the neighbors aren’t around. We don’t use flashlights upstairs except for navigation—too many windows.”
“Upstairs?”
“There’s a whole apartment up top,” George says. “We’ll sleep up there. It gets cold in here at night and super hot in the morning. Upstairs is insulated.”
Iph follows the beam of George’s flashlight up a narrow staircase.
“We have water. The city never turned it off. But it’s cold. The bathroom window has a shade that’s pretty tight, so we can use a little light up there if we’re careful. C’mon, Tinkerbell. I do think we should go up and take a better look at those feet.”
Upstairs is shadowy, but Iph’s eyes adjust. The streetlight seeps between the cracks in the drapes. Kitschy fifties paneling lines one wall of an oddly situated living room. The other wall is a muddy green. They pass a scratchy-looking plaid sofa and matching La-Z-Boy recliner, both a little big for the room. Iph follows George to a narrow elephant-themed bathroom.
“It’s like a time capsule,” Iph says. There’s even a pink elephant soap dish and matching cotton-ball canister.
“Nana redecorated in 1964. After that, she said why mess with perfection.”
“That’s valid,” Iph says, touching the shiny wallpaper with its pattern of champagne glasses and round, tipsy elephants.
“Sit.” George puts the pink fluff-covered toilet lid down, grabs something from the medicine cabinet, and squats in front of her, reaching for her ankle. She allows this without protest, even though her feet are truly gross, crook-toed and bony. Iph sighs as her feet are washed with a cold cloth and dried with a soft towel, and antibiotic ointment and Band-Aids are expertly applied, along with the fuzzy socks from the hotel lost and found box. She is already used to George taking care of her.
“You could be a doctor,” Iph says.
“I want to be a nurse.”
“You’d be awesome at it.”
“I’m also pretty good with a hot plate. Want some SpaghettiOs?”
8
Moon-Froth
Covered Her Face
The coyote leads Orr down the mountain. The night has turned clear. He shivers, ears painfully exposed without his hair. Aside f
rom the quarterly trims Mom did in the kitchen, always during a full moon because she said it was good luck, his hair had never been cut. All these years it worked, shielding him from germs and sounds and, lately, from the aliens haunting his dreams, beaming him to their glaring spaceships and returning him home, unable to place the tracker in his neck as they did with Agent Scully.
Mom is dead, he keeps thinking. He knows that’s not true, but she feels dead, unreachable hundreds of miles away in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Before she left, she showed him pictures so he could imagine her there—the cottage where she’d sleep, the dance studio with its meadow-flung windows and shiny wood floors, the sprawling wooden common house with the fireplace in the kitchen where she would hang out and eat with other artists—but the moment she drove away, the pictures began to fade. After five days, they were gray in his mind, like newsprint left in the rain. After a week, they were gone.
At first, she called every other day, but her voice sounded wrong, and Orr began to worry she’d been replaced by someone else. It was a weird thing to think. He knew that. He told her calling once a week was better. He told her he was completely fine. It was his first truly successful lie.
After that, he trudged through the motions of summer. Video marathons—sci-fi when he chose, Marilyn and musicals when Iph did. Brunch competitions with Iph and their neighbor Mindy, a Dungeons & Dragons–playing twelve-year-old aspiring chef. At his age, he was supposed to be considerate. Self-sufficient. But every night he tossed and turned until dawn, and every day it was harder to get out of bed.
Now he follows the coyote, probably a mother herself, to a dirt road that eventually leads to Highway 26.
Orr loves maps. Because of that, he knows this road. He walks it for a long time. Hours. He isn’t sure how many. As the sky begins to purple, he looks back and sees how thick the forest is, how lost he might have been without the coyote’s help. But she’s brought him straight to this road that leads, fork after fork, mile after mile, right to his own tree-lined street. To his long gravel drive and the wood and glass house his father built his mother to get her to marry him.
Orr goes there in his mind as his body trudges the roadside. Inside the rustic-planked doors are soft, bright Mexican carpets in the colors his mother loves: magenta, cherry, gold, and parrot green. There are seventeen light switches with plates he and Mom and Iph had collaged using animal images from the Audubon calendar. There are forty windows, all looking out on something beautiful and green. There are fifteen stairs to the upstairs hall, where a window frames a fig tree named Fiona, her large fruit lusted after by his mother’s favorite troupe of cedar waxwings—Bowie birds, she calls them, because of their Ziggy Stardust hair and makeup and their love of getting high on fermented fruit. At the height of the fig frenzy, some of them eat so much they fall off the tree, too drunk to perch. Iph and Orr used to collect the stunned party birds and place them carefully in towel-lined shoebox drunk tanks, waiting for them to sleep it off.
At the top of the stairs is the family room, an open, octagonal space jutting over the living room like the crow’s nest in a ship. This is where movies are watched, board games played. Down the hall are the bedrooms. The third door on the left is Orr’s.
His room is sanctuary blue. His bed is narrow and canopied with an Indian tapestry of leaping deer that Mom used as a bedspread when she lived in New York. Orr can smell the just-right scent of the lavender sachets his mother places in his drawers. It’s as if he’s come back from an early-morning trip to the bathroom. He sees it all so clearly—the droppers of flower essence tinctures in their perfect line on his bedside table: Rock Rose for bad dreams, Cherry Plum for depression, Rescue Remedy for freak-outs.
He’s imagining climbing into bed when he realizes the coyote has stopped. She’s sitting a few feet away, patient.
She waits for him to catch up to the truth.
Home is a thing of the past. As long as his father is there, Orr can never go back.
The coyote crinkles her furry lids to comfort him.
He trembles so hard, he thinks maybe it’s the earth. A quake? The landing of a spacecraft so large it’s shaking the snow off the mountain?
But no. Only him. Him and the first hint of birdsong and the fur-jacketed lady coyote who blinks at him, waiting for him to do the thing humans are supposed to do—think.
Orr could call his mother. If he were home, he would. The number is written in Sharpie on the notepad by the telephone in the entryway. Maybe he could find the number some other way. Information. 411. He could tell them the name of the residency. All he needs is to find a phone.
He thinks of his calendar, the X’d-out days until his mother comes home. Sixteen down, seventy-three to go.
There’s no way he can survive in the woods for even a week on his own. He’s read My Side of the Mountain, about the boy who left home to live off the land in the Catskills, taming a peregrine falcon to hunt for him. But even with his coyote guide, Orr knows he’s not tough enough. He has allergies. Gets headaches. Is vegetarian. Neither he nor Iph have ever eaten meat, although Dad sometimes used to dare them. “Fifty bucks,” he would say when they drove past a McDonald’s.
Satisfied that Orr knows what is what, the coyote scratches and gets up, trotting to where the road widens. In the light, he can see she is shedding, fur rising in unkempt tufts on her rusty haunches. She glances down the road toward a sign: rest stop. She and Orr walk side by side until they reach it.
A water faucet, a bench, a bathroom . . . and a phone! Orr picks it up, but there’s no dial tone. He turns to look for the coyote, but she is already trotting off into the tree line beyond the parking lot.
Orr panics. But then he stops. He is alone. More alone than he’s ever been. He can’t rely on Mom or Iph, only himself.
He laps water at the faucet, a little at a time, until he feels better. He goes into the bathroom. The women’s, he realizes when he sees the tampon machine. But it doesn’t matter. No one is here. He uses the hand dryer to warm himself even though the roar hurts his ears.
Outside, the sky is paling and the birds are waking up. Orr walks the way the coyote had. The trees open to a rocky beach along a river. A scrub jay caws from a tree and flies downstream. Orr follows until the beach widens. Ahead is a large canvas tent, the bigger version of the place where he’d woken up with his hands tied and hair shorn. In front of the tent is a campfire, and tending the fire is a young woman with a cigarette in one hand and a hot dog on a stick in the other.
Orr stops and the woman looks up. For a moment, he thinks the coyote is back. That’s what her surprised face seems to say. But it’s Orr she is staring at.
“Hey there,” she calls, as raspy as Orr’s Greek grandmother. “Where’d you come from?”
“I escaped from some kidnappers,” Orr says.
“No shit?” The girl blinks. “Seriously. Are you shitting me? ’Cause I’m a little hungover for boyish pranks.”
“I’m not shitting,” Orr says. He likes her swearing. It reminds him of Mom.
“Were you hitchhiking? I know you’re a dude, but it’s still not safe. Pervs are pervs, babe. You gotta watch out.”
“I don’t think they were pervs,” Orr says. “It was a boot-camp place. They came to my house and put a hood over my head and put me in a van and took me there.” He points toward the mountain.
“You escaped from Meadowdouche? What are you, like, a boy wizard?”
“I had some help.” Orr grins. Why is he smiling at this strange woman? He only does that with family. And Mindy, their neighbor.
“You okay?”
“I’m hungry,” Orr says.
“Here,” she says, holding out the hot dog. Orr’s mouth literally waters. Not a figure of speech after all, he realizes.
“I shouldn’t,” Orr says.
The girl laughs. “I don’t bite.” This
is another expression Orr had needed to parse when he was little—just a joke, and no one expected other people to bite them. Except when it came to Iph, who was known to bite when provoked and occasionally when she was overcome with love.
“I’m a vegetarian,” Orr says.
“Well then.” The girl stands up and walks toward Orr with legs that are not in long pants as Orr first thought, but in cutoff shorts and covered in tattoos. “It’s your lucky day. This is prime tofu wiener, my friend. Burned to a perfect crisp.” She grins, showing a gap between her two large front teeth.
Orr’s smile widens.
“C’mon, kid,” she says, turning back to the fire. “Have a seat. We’ve got five packs of these puppies—I’ll get us some ketchup. You want a beer?”
9
Diction
and Singing
Iph can’t sleep. At home, there’s a Jacuzzi tub for this in the pink bathroom attached to her bedroom, lined with vanilla-scented candles and lavender salts. There’s her stereo and the pile of sleep mixes she and Orr trade to battle their insomnia, plus the guided meditations they borrowed from the library for their summer project of learning how to lucid dream. There’s the stash of sleeping pills she’s pilfered carefully from Mom and the vibrator—marketed as a neck massager—she shoplifted when her “friends” ditched her in Walgreens last year and took the bus to the mall without her. In winter, there’s the rain on the roof, and now, in summer, there are crickets and tree frogs and the grove of plum trees behind the house, full of sleeping birds.
Here, there’s the occasional car, the buzz of the streetlight, and a too-soft mattress that is an odd size between a double and a twin and smells faintly of menthol cigarettes. Her bed at home is a queen, a present for her tenth birthday with a headboard and footboard that Dad made himself, with hand-carved roses and gilded thorns like something out of Sleeping Beauty. “For my princess,” he said.
Summer in the City of Roses Page 4
