Summer in the City of Roses

by Michelle Ruiz Keil

  Iph almost forgets to care about acting when she imagines directing someone like this. Cait doesn’t even bother to put her body in character, as Iph surely would have had to do to make the phone call she’s making. This girl is used to being obeyed. A fan of brochures filched from a filing cabinet in her mother’s study sits on the bed next to her. None match the exact one Iph saw in Orr’s room, but these are all from a few years ago, the font sort of hokey and the kids’ clothes a little outdated. Iph is sure it’s Meadowbrook, though. The lodge looks right, the position of the mountain in the background the same as in the brochure on Orr’s desk. Cait tries it first.

  Draped across her king-size canopy bed in baggy sweats and a cropped Hello Kitty tee and smoking a clove cigarette, she sounds like the world’s most bougie Euro-mom. “I’d like a progress report on my son. Orestes Santos Velos,” she demands in a clipped, sexy growl. The rationale behind the accent is clear when she says Orr’s not-American-sounding name. In Cait’s mouth, it communicates “diplomatic corps” and “Spanish aristocracy” and “owns a Greek Island”—a strange opposite to Mom’s California lilt and occasional Spanglish, which used to make people wonder if she was Iph and Orr’s babysitter.

  “What?” Cait’s accent almost drops. She sits up. “Are you joking?”

  Something is wrong.

  “Has his father been informed?” she sputters as if genuinely affronted, the accent thicker now. Iph can hear the faint hiss of words on the other end of the phone. Cait nods and puts the receiver down in its cradle.

  14

  The Period

  of Emotional

  Experience

  Iph tries Dad every ten minutes until they have to go.

  “You could stay and keep trying,” Cait says. “It’s just George. Persona non grata. My parents would have a fit.”

  “No worries.” Iph meets Cait’s eye easily now. They are definitely going to be friends.

  Iph picks up a photo on the nightstand: two blonde girls in swimsuits at the beach. There’s so little margin between where Iph is now and where Cait lives every day as an only child. She may have supermodel cheekbones and mile-long legs, but her sister—her sister—is dead.

  Cait rummages through her purse. Vintage Coach, simple with a brass lock. A smaller version of Mom’s favorite bag, one she bought new in the early seventies with her first paycheck from an off-Broadway show.

  “Here,” Cait says. “Take my phone card. Run it up all you want. My dad’s accountant pays it; my parents will never see the bill.” She slips it into the front pocket of Iph’s overalls with a packet of travel tissues.

  At the bus stop, she and George are silent. The heat feels good after the air-conditioning at Cait’s. It’s when Iph goes to blow her nose, stuffy from crying, that she discovers the twenty-dollar bills Cait tucked in her pocket. They get off the bus on Hawthorne in front of Burgerville. Iph tries Dad. He doesn’t pick up, and the machine is full.

  After a Gardenburger Iph can barely swallow, she tries again while George stays in the cool restaurant with Scout. Like most people, the manager is a Scout fan and allows her to sit discreetly in a corner booth lapping water from a cup while George feeds her a child-size burger and fries.

  It’s boiling at the pay phone. Iph remembers why she hates summer. This time, Dad picks up on the first ring.

  “Iph.” Dad sounds like he’s swimming underwater.

  “Did you find him?”

  “There was a search team,” Dad says. “With dogs. Wait, how’d you know he was gone?”

  “Is he okay?” The last time they went camping, Orr had to go to the emergency room for a wasp sting. Without help, he could have died.

  “He’s fine, sweetie. I know he is.”

  “You had him kidnapped. Now they’ve lost him. That doesn’t sound fine.”

  “There’s a waitress who swears she saw him yesterday with a bunch of tattooed girls.”

  “Dad! That doesn’t sound like Orr.”

  “Eggs over medium, extra hash browns, add cheddar.”

  “Sub pancakes for toast,” Iph whispers.

  “Hot chocolate, lukewarm.” Dad’s voice breaks. “It was him. He must have hitched a ride.”

  Iph’s mouth is hanging open. She shuts it and closes her eyes.

  “The waitress said the girls looked like punkers from Portland.”

  Iph stands up straighter. He knows punkers is outdated. The cute dorky Dad routine isn’t going to work. “Good thing there are so few tattooed girls in Portland. Finding him should be a breeze.”

  “Iph, come on. Where are you?”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’m fine.”

  “That’s not what I asked.” There it is—Dad’s I’m an Olympian god and you’re a peon mortal voice. “Iph?”

  “Portland,” Iph says. “With friends.” Mom would have jumped right on this—she knows Iph’s friends, if you could call them that, and none of them live in the city. “What about you? I called like a thousand times.”

  “How kind of you,” Dad says. “That really helped when I was out scouring the streets.”

  “I came back to the hotel. You were gone.”

  Dad exhales. Iph feels him letting go of the rope. That’s what he and Mom call it when one person realizes a fight is going nowhere. “When I got back, someone said Bill’s daughter left early. I thought you must have gotten a ride with her.”

  “You thought I was with Mackenzie? Our last sleepover was in second grade. She thinks Phyllis Schlafly is a feminist icon. We’ve hated each other for years.”

  “I assumed you hated me more.” Dad’s gone quiet. Like Iph, his temper rises quickly and falls as fast. “I went to call you over there when you didn’t come home. The phone was off the hook.”

  “I know,” Iph says. “The hotel guy called the operator for me.”

  “That guy!” Iph can picture Dad shaking his head. “Couldn’t answer a simple question. I had to lean on him pretty hard. A big tip helped. Apparently, you left with some boy.”

  There is a beat. A weighted silence.

  “Dad, I told you. I’m perfectly fine.”

  Another beat. She can hear him shifting in his seat. “I called the police. They told me to call back if you were gone more than three days. I got home at four in the morning, and a few minutes later, Meadowbrook called. I drove straight there.” Dad stops, takes a drink of something. “Iph,” he finally says, “are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Dad. I just ate a Gardenburger.”

  “Really? That’s good. You left your purse, so I was worried.” He exhales like a horse, a thing Iph used to love when she was little enough to ride on his shoulders. “I still can’t believe it. Your brother ran away.”

  Is that pride in Dad’s voice? Running away is exactly the sort of thing he would admire. He’s always telling stories about his adventures with his brother—pranks and misdemeanors, outsmarting neighborhood bullies. It would be just like him to spin Orr’s disappearance into some sort of Huck Finn adventure. The fact that this is the only kind of bravery Dad can see is the whole problem. He’s always underestimated Orr.

  A group of squealing toddlers swarm the outside tables. Iph plugs her free ear.

  “Did you call Mom?”

  He hesitates. “I want to find him first.”

  Iph has never considered the possibility of her parents breaking up. They aren’t just married. They’re in love. They walk hand in hand. Stay up late talking politics and art. It’s a common occurrence to enter a room and find them holding each other silently and breathing like they are each other’s air. But if anything could break them apart, it’s this.

  “Dad, why? What were you thinking?”

  “I’m his father.” Iph hears ice cubes clinking in a glass. Is Dad drinking? That was a thing when Iph and Orr were little, Dad drinking a little
too much every night.

  “It’s iced coffee,” he says. As much as he blows off Iph’s intuition, he’s the other one in the family who seems to share it. “I know things are a mess, Iph. I’m not resting until I figure this out. I’m sure he’ll call home soon. He hates sleeping away . . .” Dad trails off, perhaps stopped short by his own hypocrisy. Mom was going to have his guts for garters.

  Iph shivers. Someone walked over your grave. That’s what Mom always says about those weird spasms. The shiver and the saying became a part of her dance piece. She spent hours in the studio behind the house working variation after variation of it—that moment of cold or premonition or possession.

  The working title of Mom’s three-part modern ballet is El Mundo Bueno/El Mundo Malo, from a favorite book of hers—The Fifth Sacred Thing, a utopian alternative history by an ecofeminist witch. The good reality and the bad reality exist side by side, Mom wrote in her application for the residency, imperceptibly separate, like the scrim between waking and sleep. The trick is knowing where you are. Is the bad reality a dream that you only need to wake up from? Is the good reality lost in a single moment, like falling asleep at the wheel?

  Iph wonders now if the two worlds are not separate, but simultaneous. Or what if there is a space between them, a no-man’s-land where things are good and bad all at once? Orr at boot camp and now lost is a living nightmare—but this otherworld she’s found in Portland is the stuff of impossible dreams.

  In just two days these strangers feel more like friends than the kids she grew up with. Even though they have every right to judge her, pickled as she is in her spoiled suburban childhood, they’ve been nothing but accepting and kind. Maybe time in El Mundo Malo marks you. Maybe George and Josh and Cait saw it before she did—that her life will never be the same.

  Dad’s ice clicks like he’s draining the coffee. “Iph? Are you still there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “I did a lot of research. Visited several places. Your mom and I talked about it last year, but she didn’t think it was a good idea. He was just so depressed with her gone. I wanted to help him find his power.”

  “Waiting for Mom to come back without freaking out was Orr exercising his power. He needs to shut down sometimes. If you were ever around, you’d know that. But you’re always at work or in your study or out on a date with your precious wife. You don’t even know your own kids. I hope you’re happy.”

  There is a hiss of breath—the sound of Dad expelling his own monster, the temper she’d inherited. In and out, three times. Then, “The camp has an investigator who’s on it. The police will start looking if they don’t find him by tomorrow.”

  “The police? Dad, oh my god.” Iph will never forget the day she found Mom doubled over in the kitchen, a copy of some magazine at her feet. There was an article about a kid who sounded a little like Orr, a brown-skinned boy who was melting down. There were cops and a gun and it was too close to home.

  “Dad, we don’t need the cops. There’s no way he’d sleep on the street. And if he’s in the city, he’s definitely not lost. Every time we’re in Portland, Mom tests him, asks which way to go and he always knows. And I mean, at least it’s girls who have him. They sound like kids, right?”

  “College age,” Dad says. “The waitress said they were rowdy but harmless. Talked about music and castrating rapists.” There’s a little uptick in Dad’s tone. He’s all about that Greek-tragedy level of revenge. Told Iph when she was ten that if any guy even tried to touch her against her will, kicking him in the balls was her birthright. “And you’re right,” he says. “We’ll find him. Come home, kuklamu.”

  Kukla. Dad’s special nickname for her—“little doll” in Greek. Iph gets a wave of Dad: his bear-deep singing voice and cedar aftershave and honey shampoo. The world quiets, and it’s him and Iph on a silent stage, their fast-beating hearts pounding over the sound system.

  Dad needs help. Needs her. And yes, of course Iph wants to go home to her obscenely soft bed and enormous bathtub and full refrigerator and house that is shined weekly by a team of housekeepers. But can she?

  Suddenly, she’s not mad anymore. “Where are you?” she asks. “The deck?”

  His voice catches as he says, “Treehouse.” Orr’s treehouse. The special place Dad made for him in the days when he was still trying to have an actual relationship with his son. He installed a phone up there, extending the landline from the second floor to the majestic linden at the bottom of their property where Orr retreated when things were too much. He could be alone there with Mom just a phone call away.

  Dad sniffs. Is he crying?

  “Let’s go find him, Dad. Let’s find him together.”

  “I’ll come get you.”

  I’ll stay if you come back. That’s what George said when Iph went into the hotel.

  Now, after all they’ve been through, Iph can’t just say goodbye at this Burgerville. There has to be something more she can do. Some small way to pay George back for saving her. She’ll have to be crafty. George was not happy when Iph discovered the twenties from Cait.

  “She knows not to pull that with me,” George said. “Unless Scout’s going hungry, I won’t take a handout. Of course, she left the larder open on purpose, knowing I don’t mind nicking a few things from her robber-baron parents.”

  “Who says larder?” Iph laughed. “Who says robber baron and nick?” Then she saw what was in the backpack—a full bottle of gin and a six-pack of tonic water, several limes, and a carton of cigarettes. “And who needs all this?”

  George quoted Shakespeare again, this time from King Lear. “This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen.”

  “Dad? Are you still there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “We need to make flyers,” Iph says. “My friend here is an artist who could totally make one. Like those police sketches.” Maybe George will let Dad pay for that, like a commission. It’s worth a shot, and maybe a better option than the few outdated snapshots they have of Orr, who hates being photographed. “I’m in Southeast. There’s not a phone, but I can meet you—”

  “Iph?” Dad’s tone is suddenly cautious. “There’s something else. Before you make a flyer.” Dad clears his throat. “Honey, they cut Orr’s hair.” There is a beat that goes on a breath too long. “They shaved his head.”

  Anger has always been fleeting for Iph, there and gone faster than an ice cream headache. What she feels now is something else. It’s muscled and clear-eyed and huge. This tiger-footed rage. Padding, soft, calculating. She shakes with it.

  Her father is forgotten. She is nowhere, no place at all. Or someplace between atoms, some other dimension, sent away in a Hail Mary play to save life on earth because she’s about to explode, and it will be nuclear.

  Something is hot. Metal. The outside of the phone booth. She stumbles forward. There is a wall. She manages a pivot, the stucco rising to meet her back. She slides down to the hot pavement and clamps her hands over her face, not wanting anyone to hear the sound she is going to make. She weeps until she’s sick with it. As if it is work she is being forced to do.

  She gasps for breath and opens her eyes. The women herding the birthday party toddlers are making a quick exit, careful not to look at her.

  She wipes her face. Finds one of the tissues from Cait. Blows her nose. The phone dangles on its metal cord like the Hanged Man in Mom’s deck of tarot cards. She will get up any moment to hang it up. Sever her connection with Dad. She presses her back into the burning wall. She closes her eyes.

  Scout pushes her sleek head under Iph’s hand and presses her body into Iph’s lap. Iph holds her. George reaches out a hand to help her up. Iph thinks of Mom, how she always wants to talk through every little thing, and for the first time ever she’s glad to be away from her. The world is large and airy without her parents and their epic love affair and beautiful house and worry
for Orr.

  She and George walk into the quiet of Ladd’s Addition, a neighborhood right off Hawthorne laid out around traffic circles full of roses. The Craftsman homes here are stately and square, made for large prosperous families. The massive trees—oaks and maples and cherries, the same vintage as the houses—touch fingers in the middle of the street like a line of couples waiting for a minuet to begin.

  Scout scampers ahead to sniff, then waits for them to catch up. Iph likes the feel of George’s hand in hers. She doesn’t remember when it got there, but they’re walking together like they do this every day. They emerge from Ladd’s Addition at Division, and Iph is pretty sure if they go left, they’ll be back at Taurus Trucking. But even though they’re tired, they can’t go back, not yet. It’s the weekend, so the neighbors could come home anytime.

  They cross Division and walk aimlessly, changing sides of the street to follow the shade. Iph likes this modest neighborhood even more than grand Ladd’s, with its mix of smaller bungalows and low-slung fifties garden apartment buildings and varied yards, some with unwatered lawns the color of toast, others psychedelic with bloom. They pass a house with a porch dressed in yellow roses that look and smell like cupcakes. There are two rust-flecked red tricycles and a pair of muddy clogs on the porch. Another house has dandelions gone to seed, a resplendent passionflower vine, and a peeling porch flanked by jasmine and purple hydrangea lounged upon by five fat cats.

  “Come on,” George says, turning the corner and breaking into a run. Scout darts to catch George, then shoots back to Iph, who does not run unless she is made to, and only then if she is wearing a sports bra over a very supportive underwire in a temperature below fifty degrees.

  This street is shaded with lindens and cherries framing houses that are set up from the street with sidewalk-chalked cement staircases leading to their wide front porches. More cats. More kids’ toys. And in the middle of the block, a little oasis of a park. “Scout’s favorite,” George says. “A pocket park for a pocket pit.”

  There is tender grass and glorious shade. In the center is a little elevated playground, bordered by a low brick wall, pungent with fresh cedar chips and shiny clean from yesterday’s rain. George has already climbed to the top of the slide with Scout.