Summer in the City of Roses

by Michelle Ruiz Keil

  Iph sinks into the grass. A giggle, children’s voices. The lovely rise and fall of George’s voice directing Scout through her repertoire of tricks. The calliope sound of an ice cream truck in the distance. Iph closes her eyes, too exhausted to worry about anything.

  She wakes at sunset to a melted-popsicle sky. George and Scout are crashed out beside her, both of them softly snoring. The air is still, and the playground is empty of children who are surely being put to bed, upset because it’s still light outside.

  Iph wanders toward the play structure. She sits on a swing, languid at first, then pumping her legs. Now she’s flying alone in the sky. Crows roost in the tallest trees. Streetlights come on a few at a time.

  Iph feels for Orr, imagines him swinging next to her. For years they’ve been honing their psychic powers, practicing ESP and, since last spring, lucid dreaming. They’d always treated it like it was a game, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe somehow, they knew something would happen and were training for this separation.

  The rhythm of the swing is perfect for self-hypnosis.

  How do my hands feel when Orr is swinging next to me?

  How do my legs feel when we do the thing where we sync the swings and pump in time?

  How can my heartbeat match Orr’s heartbeat?

  How can my breath mirror his breath?

  Iph slits her eyes and sees a small blue window high in a wall, the indigo moment right before dark. The exact color Orr and Mom have claimed as their own. A square, closet-size room. A velvet nap of dark hair on a delicate egg of a head on a faded zebra-striped pillow. It’s probably just a comforting daydream. But sometimes, these weird daydreams of hers turn out to be true.

  Clairvoyant is what Mom’s New Age New York chorus-girl friend pronounced Iph when she predicted who was calling when the phone rang three times in two days. Dad says it’s coincidence, especially when he does it, and maybe it is. It’s never anything big. What’s for dinner, what color someone will be wearing. Who’s about to call. And usually no more than a few minutes into the future. Close enough that they’ve always laughed it off. Except sometimes, it’s something bigger. Like when Iph had a nightmare that Yai-Yai fell on the ice. Or when Mom applied to the residency and Iph knew she would get it. So there is a chance that somewhere in this city a few minutes from now when the sun has just set, Orr will be snuggled in some safe zebra-cushioned nest, fast asleep.

  She sends him a hug, her love. Pumps harder, swings higher.

  Now George is beside her, swinging in rhythm.

  In sync, they slow down.

  Iph holds out a hand. George takes it.

  Together, hands clasped, they jump.

  15

  Mother,

  My Mother

  Orr wakes as the streetlights come on outside. The last thing he remembers is sitting on the sofa with a coverless copy of Dragonsong, lent to him by Mika—not reading, just listening to the comforting sound of the Furies’ whispered talk and the almost-silence of their bare feet as they padded around the cluttered house. Now they are in their rooms. Allison, Mika, and Jane. Music and TV and cigarette smoke seep out from under the cracks of their three doors and sneak down the stairs.

  Orr is so tired. He curls into himself, but the living room is too open, the door unseeable behind the cat-smelling sofa’s back. Where is this cat? Orr barely remembers Dad’s famous Maine coon, Agamemnon. Even though they all love animals, they haven’t had a pet since then. It’s too hard for Dad, Mom says. Their shorter life spans. The loss.

  This sofa smells like several cats and, if he’s honest, something like Mindy’s house, where there are four guinea pigs, three indoor Abyssinians, and a rude parrot that reminds Orr of Iph when she has PMS.

  Iph. He’s barely thought of her since his escape. Can only stand to do it now for a minute or two. He usually thinks of her often. When he reads, he notes things to tell her. When he runs, he arranges playlists or new songs he will learn on the cello to stump her in their games of Name That Tune. So what’s going on now? Memory erasure? Mind control? Orr indexes X-Files episodes, cross-referenced with Star Trek. Maybe the people at the boot camp were aliens in disguise. Or humans working for aliens. Or for the government. Maybe they put a tracker in his neck like they had with beautiful, badass Agent Scully.

  He touches his head. Could his hair have already grown back a little? How many months would it take to reach its former length? And even if it did, would it ever be the same?

  There is a story he tells himself at night. His hair features prominently. That, like so much else, will have to change. Not even in fantasy can Orr have long hair anymore. Its taking was too brutal, his transformation too extreme.

  In the old story, Orr was a hero in his own personal X-File. Because his hair shielded him, he was able to sneak into the spaceship, sabotage the aliens’ experiments, and free the people who’d been abducted, helping them recover their memories and heal from the violation of being taken unknowing from their beds every night for months, or in some cases, years. In the end, both Agents Mulder and Scully fell in love with him. Orr could never decide which one to kiss.

  Now, will anyone ever want to kiss him? Like Jo March in Little Women, he considered his hair to be the one thing that made him beautiful. He still hasn’t looked in a mirror to see if that’s changed. Tomorrow, he promises himself. Standing before the mirror is a practice of his. The boy in his reflection is his old friend—himself, but not him. A boy trapped in the room inside the mirror. It’s a silly game from when he was very small, but still. Routines are grounding. Ritual makes daily life sacred, according to Mom. She told him that when she was packing for the residency. She’d been trying to get him to write out a daily schedule for himself for when she was gone.

  “Ritual creates boundaries,” she said, holding a red dress against herself in the mirror.

  “Bring it,” Orr said. “It’s one of your best.”

  “Boundaries are containers.” Mom folded the dress into her suitcase. “Like a glass jar. Nothing special—till you think about what they can contain. All sorts of ambient intangibles.”

  Ambient Intangibles is the name Orr gave an imaginary paranormal investigative agency in a series of stories he was writing last winter. The whole family adopted it as shorthand for the inexplicable or vast—space, time, consciousness, the afterlife.

  “I keep imagining a big invisible spider I’m trying to trap in a mason jar so I can take him outside,” Orr said, fiddling with the zipper on Mom’s suitcase.

  “Sorry.” Mom touched his hair, running a strand of it between her two fingers from his temple to where it ended below his shoulder blade. “But maybe it’s not a spider. Or maybe it’s a nice one.”

  “Maybe.”

  Mom stopped in front of him with a pair of socks in her hand. “Actually, I think the metaphor is good. Like, what if this ambient intangible gets out of control? Invisible spiders running rampant in your bedroom. Then what do you do?”

  “Freak out?” Orr was kidding but also serious.

  Mom laughed. “That’s right, mijo. You freak the fuck out. And then you have to learn. You need a procedure. I’m asking you to think about what intangibles create chaos in your life. And what rituals could you create to contain them?”

  Orr understood a little, but not all the way. “Bring this,” he said, holding up one of Mom’s most prized concert tees, thin now and faded from red to pink, from the second ever Bread and Roses Festival. They’d driven all the way to Berkeley for the three days of concerts. Iph says it’s her first memory—the sound of Joni Mitchell’s voice under the moon.

  Orr remembers none of it but loves to hear Mom and Dad tell the story of that trip—camping on the Rogue River on the way down, staying with a friend of Dad’s in Berkeley and an old hotel in the redwoods on the way home. All of them cozy in the car together. Mom and Dad realizing they could still have ad
ventures even though they had kids.

  Mom took the shirt, squinted at the pinholes along the hem, rolled it up, and tucked it inside a chunky brown ankle boot wedged in the corner of her suitcase.

  “Three months is a long time,” Orr said.

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, love. Think of it like beads on a necklace. Each chunk of time is a bead you string on the wire of the day. Be aware of this and you will calm down—”

  “—because repetition is inherently calming.” Orr finishes for her. They both know repetition’s power from direct experience, Orr from music and Mom from dancing. They tried an experiment once: Orr wrote a song and Mom made a dance where nothing repeated. Neither piece worked.

  Mom’s eyes go darker and brighter. “When you slow down and make these daily activities conscious, you begin to see the beads differently. They start out plain. Boring. It’s more about accumulation at that stage, like checking off days on a calendar or doing pliés at the bar. But after a while, the beads get shiny. Like by touching them again and again, you polish them into gems. That’s when you know you’re getting close.”

  “Close to what?”

  “El Mundo Bueno. Life as art.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I learned it the hard way, mi amor. The way I do everything.” She was laughing, but there was also sadness.

  “Why?” Orr was pushing now. “I mean, I learn this stuff from you. Didn’t your parents teach you?”

  Mom was silent at first, matching pairs of socks. Orr thought she was, as usual, blowing him off. Then she said, “There has to be trust for that, mijo. But I did learn things from my parents. I learned who not to be and what not to do. And that’s something, right?”

  She folded her second-best jeans in half, then rolled them up. Orr didn’t like to see them tucked away. Mom was quiet again. Orr saw her trying to decide what to tell him. She did that a lot. With Dad, the stories flowed. They’d heard about his childhood exploits hundreds of times. With Mom, they came out very rarely, like deer in the yard in winter.

  She took a breath. “I was a little lost when I first had Iph. Then you came along so soon after. I was overwhelmed for a while. Your dad had to do everything. For a little while I even stopped nursing you. He fed you bottles. I stayed in bed. Then one day he burst in with a kid under each arm and plopped you both down next to me and stalked to the bathroom to take a shower.”

  Orr can see Dad doing this. And Mom still gets sad like that sometimes, but usually only for a day or two.

  Mom patted Orr’s hand and smiled. “You two were staring at me with your big black eyes in your creepy alien baby heads like What now? So I brought you down to the kitchen and put you in the playpen. You were standing in there with your hands on the bars like little jailbirds in your white onesies and sticking-up hair. I went to make some tea, but the kitchen was disgusting. That’s how you know your dad was losing it.

  “I don’t know why I thought to do it, but I set the egg timer for ten minutes and tidied till it dinged. Then I went to the hall bathroom and washed my face. A pair of earrings was there on the shelf. I hadn’t worn dangly earrings since I’d had Iph. The midwife told me I’d have to give them up because babies pull on them. I can’t believe I listened to that. As you know, I might as well be naked without earrings.”

  He knew. Mom went nowhere without jewelry. It was her armor.

  “So I put them on and kept doing that every day after washing my face. Then I’d go downstairs and set the timer for ten minutes. Then I’d have my tea. Like a little ritual—see where I’m going with this? If one of you interrupted the routine, I started where I left off. That timer was my lifeline, mijo. A little container of time. It wasn’t fast, but after a while I learned to string the beads together like spells—dishes, garden, dance class, carpool. They all became sacred.”

  “Why are you leaving, then?”

  “You know I’m coming back, right?”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  Mom sighed and spoke to her reflection in the mirror, head cocked to one side. “I have to work again, my love. You and your sister are growing up. I need to grow, too.”

  She handed him the packet then, printed and comb-bound at Dad’s office. Each day, a list. Little notes from her. Reading it, he became aware of a growing sensation of cold.

  He stood up. “This isn’t for me,” he told Mom. “It’s for you.”

  “I thought it would help. Just little reminders . . .”

  “This isn’t about me,” he said. “Just admit it.”

  “You don’t have to use it.” Mom’s face was red. She looked like she might cry.

  “I won’t,” Orr said. And he took the little book and pulled it apart, ripping out its guts like a wild animal.

  “Orr!” Mom’s voice was hard. “You don’t have to use it, but don’t be an ass.”

  “I’m an ass?” Orr was shouting. “Me? You do so many things that are supposed to help me, but really, they just help you. Headphones? Great, now I don’t flip out and embarrass you at the store. Telling me my hair is pretty? Good, now I’ll take a bath so people don’t say your kid stinks when you take him to school. This is the same. You did this so you don’t have to worry. How about this? Just don’t worry at all. Just go there and forget us for the summer. We’ll be right back here when you come home. Just like always!”

  Orr shakes to remember what he did next.

  The things from the suitcase went everywhere.

  Something small and hard—maybe Mom’s green box full of earrings—flew out and hit Mom under her eye. But Orr did not stop.

  The Bread and Roses shirt was thin from so many washings.

  It ripped easily, right down the center.

  Orr threw it in Mom’s face and ran out of the room.

  Climbed up to the treehouse.

  Didn’t come out until everyone was asleep.

  A motorcycle with a terrible muffler zooms past the Furies’ house. Orr wipes his eyes. He sits up. The wood floor is gritty under his bare feet. He flops back on the cat-smelling sofa. Maps the house on his bare right leg. Allison lent him loose basketball shorts and a Bikini Kill T-shirt. Iph loves Bikini Kill, but Orr prefers Nirvana. Their music is almost painful to listen to, but it’s a good, productive sort of pain, like having sore muscles from running. More memories rise—Mom coming in to kiss him before she left for the airport. The silence of the house when everyone left. Orr presses hard on the stop button to end the memory. “No more,” he says out loud, his voice small in the quiet house. He rolls on his back and hums “Come as You Are” softly to himself.

  Kurt Cobain is another one that’s confusing—does Orr want to kiss Kurt or be him? He starts from the beginning and goes through the A side of Nevermind and feels a little better. The truth is, there’s no way he’s going to be able to sleep on this sofa. And if he doesn’t sleep, he can’t function. He tiptoes to the hall, less for quiet than because he doesn’t want to place his entire foot on the floor. Even when surfaces are clean, Orr doesn’t like much skin-to-skin contact with the floors of other people’s houses.

  In the hall by the front door is a closet. Orr has to pull hard to open it. As he suspected from the footprint of the house, it is large and square. The small high window is a nice surprise. It’s later than Orr thought, early evening. The closet is full of junk, a sediment of coats and shoes. On arrival, he noticed some boards leaning in the corner of the porch, sharp with tacks. He removes them using the nail clippers he found on the coffee table under a pile of Willamette Week newspapers and Burgerville wrappers. This works surprisingly well on the soft wood. A hunt with a flashlight in the backyard unearths a few cinder blocks. There are crickets here, like at home, but too faint to hear from inside the house. There is jasmine and some other night-blooming flower that smells like lemons. Orr is barefoot. Outside. He shakes
his head and puts his feet out of his mind. His blisters are too bad for sneakers. The whole thing is outlandish. He doubts anything could surprise him now.

  He excavates the closet until he finds floor, the same scarred, narrow oak as in the living room. The coats and impractical shoes are not as numerous as they seemed. In the entryway, he uses the boards and blocks to set up a shelf for the shoes, arranging them by size and color and heel height. He rummages for a hammer but can’t find one. A hard-soled leopard-print platform sandal his mom and Iph would have loved works fine to bang the nails from the wood scraps in a straight row. A nail for each coat, four more for guests.

  After sweeping out the now-empty closet with a broom he found in the questionable space between the refrigerator and kitchen wall, which is also stuffed with paper grocery bags, he takes the slippery cushions from the sofa and lines his nest. The cat smell is stronger here. He puts the cushions back and remembers the camping gear the girls dumped in a pile on the front porch. Out again, his feet cringing on the splintery wood, it takes three trips to bring it all inside.

  He finds the first aid kit Mika used for his feet, an old Converse shoebox with Band-Aids, rubbing alcohol, and ointment. He disinfects the blow hole on the Therm-a-Rests and blows up all three. They fit almost perfectly into the square space of the closet. He opens two sleeping bags and puts them over the camping pads and snuggles into the woodsmoke and girl smell. His heart pounds the first notes of the fear song. Orr is always anxious before sleep.

  He thinks of Iph, asleep in her rosy bedroom, her pedicured foot peeking out from the pile of light down quilts.

  Thinking about someone causes missing.

  Missing causes crying.

  Orr isn’t brainwashed; he’s smart, rationing the things he can’t control.