De la Sierra Morena,
cielito lindo, vienen bajando,
Un par de ojitos negros,
cielito lindo, de contrabando.
Iph follows the song to a stream and along the stream past a weeping willow. There, on the mossy creek bank, are Mom and Orr. He is asleep with his head on her lap, and she is stroking his face, now softly furred, and his antlers, which have grown and forked. Sitting there with her long curly hair haloed by a shaft of perfect light, Mom and Orr are a gilded Medieval painting—the Queen and the Stag.
She shifts position and looks around protectively. Now Iph sees Scout, snoring at Mom’s side. It’s always been one of Mom’s gifts, putting babies to sleep. It works as well, Iph supposes, on deer brothers and pocket pits.
“Hey, Mom!” she whispers. “Can we take him back? I have an idea.”
23
Don’t Speak
of My Father
Mom. Orr holds her hand as they walk back to the cottage like he is four years old and afraid for his first day of kindergarten. He will stay, he thinks. Of course he will stay. Maybe Iph is right. Maybe Mom’s return is the fork in the path they’ve been searching for. Maybe they will find another cottage with different magic that will help Orr become a human man instead of the thing he is becoming.
He spent the night alone, away from the rest of the herd, although their presence was everywhere in the forest in the scrapes where they’d recently slept and the trees scarred by other new antlers and the rich musk of their hooves and bodies in the wind. He walked at first, his forehead clear of antlers, his legs their normal shape. But then there was a doe. A tilt of her eye, a way she moved. It reminded him of Plum. And he was gone again, farther than ever, as he raced her through the woods. She beat him easily and lost him with as little effort—one moment ahead, melted into the trees the next. Alone again, he’d found a place to rest. He’d slept. Woken up neither boy nor stag. It was then that he heard his mother’s singing.
Inside the cottage, Orr stands over his sleeping father. Dad starts and flinches back, bumping his head hard on the window behind him.
“Orestes?” he says.
But Orr is also backing away.
Dad, the brochure, Pinocchio. The hood over his head like he’s a hawk bred for hunting. Tamed. Dad trying to talk to him after Mom left. Orr turning his back, damming up, locking down.
“I know what you tried to do,” Orr says. “But you shouldn’t have trusted those people. I needed you, Dad. Not those strangers.”
“They cut your hair,” Dad says. Orr sees his reflection in the windows behind Dad and realizes it’s a strange thing for him to say, considering the rest of his appearance.
“They hurt you.” Dad stands. Takes a step forward. Orr knows this dance—he’s learned it from the bucks. Slowly. Head low to show respect.
Orr takes a half step forward and offers Dad his velvet-covered horns, but the moment skin connects with bone, electricity moves through Orr’s body.
He is shaking, his abdomen contorting. Something last night—a shifting, rending, dizzy thing too fast for memory to process. It’s happening again. Happening now.
Orr’s knees buckle, but Dad is here. Holding him.
“Don’t let go!” Iph says.
“I won’t,” Dad says in Orr’s ear. “Not until you say so. Never again.”
24
Our Home
Theater
Orr is improvising on the cello. His notes soar and break into flower petals that float away on a river, gathering mass as they slither to shore.
Jane plays with him, flamenco runs that start soft but gather in speed to pound like a herd of hooved animals. She’s changed clothes somewhere along the way, into jeans and a plain white T-shirt. They are both in the zone, loose and aware.
“She never plays the acoustic guitar anymore,” Plum says. “I was surprised to see it at the show.”
“She’s amazing.”
“My mom met her when she was my age, living on the street in Old Town. My dad—well, he used to restore and repair old instruments. He redid that guitar for Jane. She was like, practically a professional as a kid.”
“Is she Latina?”
“Argentinian.” Plum smiles. “She can dance, too, but she never does it. Says she’s so sexy when she tangos, people start calling 911.”
“Believe it,” Jane calls in her alley-cat voice.
“Like me with these,” Orr says, cocking his head to show off the antlers. Are they . . . joking about this?
“Iph.” Plum pauses to take a sip of water. “Jane had to leave for a while, too, you know.”
“When your mom died?”
“Before that. When she was sixteen.”
“What did you turn into?” Orr asks.
“A boxcar kid, babe,” Jane answers. “For about a year.”
“She really was,” Plum says. “But she won’t tell me how to hop a train.”
“I’ll tell you how,” Jane says over a sassy stumming pattern. “Go to Union Station. Buy a flipping ticket.”
Orr laughs at them bickering like sisters.
Iph’s plan was exactly this—being together, playing music, reminding Orr of things he loves. But Mom and Dad are outside fighting, and the music has turned sad. This isn’t her brother deciding to stay. This is Orr saying goodbye.
“Jane,” Orr says when the song is over, “thanks for rescuing me that day.”
“Who rescued who, babe? That’s what I want to know.” Jane reaches out and touches the tip of an antler. “Drugs, man. They wreck your brain. Make you see shit that’s not there.”
Orr laughs. Jane lets out a shaky breath like she feels the end coming, too.
“Plum?” Orr says. “Can we go for a short walk?”
“Sure.” She squares her shoulders like Jane did. They all know it’s coming, except maybe Mom. Orr and Plum go out the front door. Jane waits a bit, then heads out after them. For a smoke, Iph guesses.
Mom wanders in through the back.
“Where’s your brother?” There’s a familiar squirt of panic in her voice. They used to lose Orr sometimes in stores. It would be too loud or smell bad, and he’d go find a place to curl up.
“Just out talking to Plum.”
“Sorry.” Mom’s been crying, but that’s a good sign. She cries when the fight is over, after she and Dad make up. She paces the workroom, stops at the little library. Iph knows her moods. It will be hard for her sit still.
“Did you see George out there? And Scout?”
“Yes, they’re out there talking to your dad,” Mom says. “So freaking cute.”
“Which one?” Iph smiles.
“Both,” Mom says, then startles. “What was that?”
“Did a book just go pssst at you?”
“Is that what’s happening?” Mom squints at the shelves. This year, she’s started to need reading glasses.
“It’s a self-recommending library,” Iph says. “The books choose you.”
Mom cocks her head to listen, then takes a slim volume and goes back outside. The sun is getting low. All day, the dream of Mom and Rob in the park in New York has been floating through her head. Why didn’t Mom ever tell them about her past? She could have at least told Iph. There were moments—when they gave money and food to street kids, when Iph asked Mom if she thought porn was inherently sexist—when she could have said something. Looking back, Iph thinks maybe there were times she almost did.
Through the front window Iph sees her mother settle in an Adirondack chair with the book. Her mother. Maybe that’s it—it’s like that old Sesame Street song. One of these things is not like the other. Maybe she didn’t know how to be both that girl in the park and Dad’s wife and Iph and Orr’s mom. Iph sees how hard she has to work to get the family to make space for her dancing. They try, but they are se
lfish. Not so much Dad, but definitely her and Orr.
Iph lies down on the rug. Earlier, they all tried to figure out when it had morphed back from a stage. The house does these things so imperceptibly, it’s hard to catch the moment of change.
The sun refracts rainbows on the walls as it hits the beveled glass windows. It’s warm, but not too hot. A perfect Portland summer evening—except that something unimaginable is about to happen.
Plum and Orr come back inside. Plum looks happy and flushed, like maybe they’ve been kissing.
Orr starts to play another song on the cello—the Schubert from the soundtrack of Iph’s favorite movie about elegant bisexual vampires Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie. Iph grins. Orr grins. They’ve seen the movie so many times and always fight over who gets to marry Bowie. Even though he’s shriveled and dying by the halfway point, he’s still so hot. In the end, Iph always capitulates because Orr gives her both Catherine Deneuve and a very young Susan Sarandon. “Two for one,” he says.
She can’t hear this song right now. She stands up, not sure where she’s going. Orr stops playing.
Plum is the one who’s brave enough to say it. “The sun is going down soon,” she says. “Orr, I think Jane and I should go. Where is she?”
“Out for a smoke.” Iph says.
“Should I maybe go see if George wants a ride?” Plum’s voice is steady. Whatever she and Orr discussed, she seems sure about it.
“I think George and Scout are out somewhere with my dad.”
“I’ll go with you,” Orr says to Plum.
With everyone out of the house, Iph is suddenly exhausted. She closes her eyes for one second. She drifts.
“Iph,” Mom says, rushing back into the house. She holds out the book she’s been reading like it’s turned into a snake.
The book is open to the poem: “The Boy Changed Into a Stag Clamors at the Gate of Secrets.” The same poem from the matchbook.
“It’s about a mother crying for her son who’s changed into a stag and can’t come back to her.” She chokes back a sob. “Iph. Is he going?”
Iph can’t look at her.
Mom drops the book, covers her mouth like she’s going to throw up, and runs out of the house. Iph follows, but stops. Across the creek standing next to the redwood where Iph tried to psychically summon Mom is a leggy woman in faded blue jeans with feathery white hair and dangling silver earrings. Is she the cottage’s owner? Something about her is familiar. The young white wolf dog is at her feet. She calls out to Mom, but Iph can’t hear what she’s saying. Mom reaches her, and the woman holds out her arm. Mom takes it, to Iph’s surprise. They walk off together on a path Iph didn’t notice before.
Iph goes back inside. Her attention is drawn to the cottage walls—the little sock in its carefully constructed shadowbox, the beautifully framed silver spoon. Baby things, but nothing from a child who’s grown. Maybe the woman in the woods owns this place, and maybe she has something to tell Mom about loss.
She picks up the book and opens to a random page. It’s near the end. She reads.
There he stood on the crest of all time,
there he stood on creation’s highest mountain,
there he stood at the gate of secrets—
the points of his antlers plated with the stars
and with a stag’s voice he cried,
cried back to his mother who’d borne him—
mother, mother, I can’t go back
the hundred wounds in me weep pure gold.
25
The Boy Changed
into a Stag Clamors
at the Gate of Secrets
Blood pounds through Orr’s antlers. The boy in the window, the same one who lives in the mirror, strokes the mossy velvet that covers them. Both he and Orr are beginning to know and love the weight of them. Orr almost laughs. He expected aliens, but never this.
The sun is setting.
George and Scout and Jane and Plum are gone.
“It’s time,” Orr says.
“Can we go out to the meadow first?” Dad asks. “Just for a minute?”
Orr hesitates, and they all see it: the lack of trust, born way before Meadowbrook.
Dad bows his head, bucklike. Orr relents.
They walk together, arms linked like the heroes of The Wizard of Oz. First Mom, then Orr, then Iph, then Dad. They hear what Dad made before they see it—a low hum, like the forest opening its mouth to sing.
The desire to find the source of the sound quickens Orr’s deeper desire, itching his ankles toward their new shape. He will control it this time, giving in when he’s ready—but then he will do what he’s been so afraid of all this time. He will fall into it until he’s fully submerged. He will know this other self entirely.
Now he walks with his family, who will always be his family. At the top of a small rise are two trees once scorched in a fire, probably years ago. They look dead, but Orr knows they aren’t. Under his bare feet, he feels it. Their children, the tall trees that circle them, will feed them as long as they live.
Between these trees, Dad has strung five thick metal wires. “Piano?” Orr asks.
“I was talking to George. We were letting the dog run around, following her, and I noticed something in the bushes over there. There was an old rotting piano that someone must have left out to pasture. I saw these trees. They’re hollow—” Dad stops himself. He loves to explain how things are made but worries other people don’t care the way that he does.
Orr runs his hand along one tree, then the other. The wind picks up and runs its invisible mane over the strings. Dad has made him a forest cello.
His antlers are tender, so he uses his hands. Later, he won’t need to. Already the bone branches are hardening. He and the wind play a duet that rings from the hollowed trees and vibrates the ground as if the song is rising from some deep cathedral.
“Dad,” he says. He can’t say more.
“Now you can make music,” Dad says, “no matter what.”
The family gathers around. They hold each other. Night is falling. The forest calls him. He wants to stay but has to go. He pulls away; they let him.
“Iph,” he says. “Come to the forest once in a while. Look for me.”
“I’m scared I won’t know you from the others,” she says, so quietly only he can hear.
“You’ll always know me,” Orr says. “Just like I’ll know you.”
“Orr?” Iph isn’t crying. She is strong. His strong big sister. “I want you to come back. When you’re done. You have to remember. It might be hard when things are so different. When you’re done, come back to me.”
Iph steps away and lets Dad put his arm around her shoulders. Orr reaches out for Mom. When had her hand gotten so small?
“Look,” Mom says, “it’s our blue.”
Linked, they gaze at the sky. The moon is rising.
Mom turns to him, traces his antlers with the palms of her hands. Licks her left index finger. Reaches down to the dirt. Traces a symbol on the back of each hand and one on his forehead. “Protection,” she says.
“I’m going into the trees now,” Orr says. “I don’t want you guys to watch.” Orr knows that seeing will frighten them.
“Te amo,” Mom says. Love in Spanish.
“S’agapo,” Dad says. Love in Greek.
“Don’t forget us,” Iph says. Love in Big Sister.
Orr can’t say anything. The night is pulsing through his veins. His body yearns to meet itself in fur and hoof and strength and speed. He has to go.
Orr walks away slowly until he hits the trees.
Then he runs.
ACT IV
How fares my child? How fares my roe?
1
The Line of
the Fantastic
“This isn’t going to work,” Iph says, l
aughing. She’s at the basement sink, washing paint brushes while George kisses the back of her neck. “Stop it or else.” Iph brandishes a hot-pink paint-covered roller. It took five coats to cover the dining room, but it’s totally worth it. The fuchsia looks so decadent with the dark wood built-ins and bookcases.
“Give me one kiss, and I’ll give it thee again, and one for interest, if thou wilt have twain,” George says, shoving Iph over to help at the sink. “Is everything out of the old house?”
“Almost,” Iph says.
Scout was the one to find the new house—they were walking back from the cello spot when she ran off, barking at them to follow. A few blocks from the Macleay Park entrance was a big yellow Victorian—Dad’s nightmare and Mom’s dream.
“It’s your turn anyway,” said Dad, lover of modern architecture, clearly hoping to trade this Victorian monstrosity for the doghouse he was still in.
Iph and Mom laughed. You could see the project wheels turning behind his eyes—how to modernize a hundred-year-old house? What would he need from the hardware store?
“Is your mom at the studio?” George has that Are we alone in the house? tone that still makes Iph swoon.
“She is,” Iph says. “But don’t you have to go?”
George is apprenticing with Shakespeare in the Shelter—a paying job that’s brought electricity back to Taurus Trucking.
“There’s a little time,” George says, pulling Iph closer. As always, Scout weaves around their ankles, worming her way in between them. George scoops her up and laughs.
“Tell my mom to get eggs if you see her,” Iph says. “And almond milk. And ice cream.”
The biggest changes at the end of summer had been Mom’s. Since George introduced her to Glow, there’s been no stopping her. She wrote a grant and got donations from all the people she charmed at Dad’s work events all these years. She found a space in Old Town and opened a movement studio catering to street folks and sex workers. People said it would be vandalized, but Mom put up with the broken windows and graffiti until people on the street started sticking up for the place. When Shakespeare in the Shelter needed a new home, Mom hooked them up.
Summer in the City of Roses Page 28
