Kinship of Clover

by Ellen Meeropol

  “You’ll be my mother.” Sam took her hand, now limp on the table. “Zoe’s grandma. Isn’t that enough?” He didn’t wait for her answer. “In any case, I’d like to take you there to visit. To see what you think.”

  “No. No is what I think.”

  Flo pulled her hand away and grabbed the ketchup bottle. Turning it upside down, she squeezed a squiggly red stripe across the table, dividing her space from Sam’s before returning the bottle to its place in the plastic condiment caddy. In one smooth gesture, her index finger swooped from the ketchup line onto her tongue.

  Chapter Six

  Every spring Gabe’s birthday brought his two estranged families together for a few hours of awkward celebration. Mid-April weather was risky for a backyard cookout, making the choice of a party venue tricky. With Tian in prison, it had been Francie’s job to represent his side of the family. Francie and Pippa usually managed to negotiate a place that was mutually acceptable: fast food or roller-skating or a 3-D action movie. One year they splurged on a pint-sized basketball court with shooting lessons and a dribbling contest and discount sneaker coupons for party favors.

  This year Gabe turned eleven, and two things were different: his father was out of prison, and his friends were having boy-girl parties in darkened basement rec rooms, with lava lamps excavated from their grandparents’ attics, a high-school DJ, and parents banned from sight.

  Tian shook his head at the request. “You see a basement in this apartment?”

  Gabe’s mother was more equivocal. “I don’t know,” Pippa said. “I’ll have to ask Anna. It’s her house. I suppose we could push back furniture in the living room to make room for dancing, but I’m not comfortable with the no-parents part.”

  Gabe had anticipated that objection and had his response ready. “How about if my big brothers keep an eye on us,” he suggested. “You trust Jeremy and Tim, don’t you? And Zoe could help.”

  “Run it by your father and Francie,” Pippa said. “If they agree, I’ll talk to Anna and you can ask the twins and Zoe.”

  By early April, Jeremy had been hanging out in Tim’s apartment for three very long weeks.

  “This is driving me batty,” he told Tim.

  “You were already batty when you got here,” Tim reminded him.

  Fair enough, but he certainly wasn’t getting any better. He had plenty of time to surf the web and read obsessively about climate change. He spent all afternoon poring through the online news and bloggers, but no one seemed to care about the role of global warming in killing off vulnerable plant species.

  He was so frustrated and so bored that when Tim suggested the lecture, his defenses were weak.

  “You doing anything tonight?” Tim had asked, appearing to concentrate on balancing his coffee cup while slipping his arms into his backpack.

  Jeremy glanced up from his laptop without answering. He never did anything in the evenings. Or in the days, for that matter, except to walk the Brooklyn neighborhoods to the defeated cadences of Gomidesia cambessedeana and Euphrasia mendoncae chanted under his breath. He walked until the Latin syllables emptied him of everything except the pavement and his feet.

  Oh yeah—and he had the coffee shop project. He sat in them for hours, watching people heading to work or home or sometimes with nowhere to go. Like him. He was just noticing, marking time. Still, there were rules to the game. The coffee shops couldn’t be chain stores, and they had to have big windows facing the street and he could never return to the same one twice.

  Still, neither walking in requiem nor sitting in coffee shops constituted plans.

  “No plans,” Jeremy had admitted, trying not to sound facetious or ungrateful.

  Tim glugged the rest of his coffee. “Great. Then meet me at the campus center auditorium at 7:30. There’s a speaker right up your alley, a climate change activist.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe climate change was real.”

  “I don’t, but you do. Come on. I want you to meet some people. I’ll even treat you to a burrito after.” Tim was out the door and clumping down the stairs before Jeremy could think of an excuse.

  That evening, Gabe’s email request came through right before Jeremy lost cell service in the subway, so he couldn’t answer Gabe even if he wanted to, even if he knew what to say. If he weren’t already on the train, he told himself, he’d turn around and go back to Tim’s place and skip this lecture.

  Emerging from the station at Flatbush, Jeremy reread Gabe’s email. He didn’t know Gabe all that well, even though they shared a father. Tian had once reigned over the big house on Pioneer Street, but when he was sent to the Federal Corrections Institution up in Berlin, Francie moved the twins to the two bedroom flat on Sumner and Gabe’s mother Pippa spent the second half of her pregnancy in a women’s shelter, supervised by the court. When Gabe was born, the judge allowed Pippa to move with her baby into the two-family house a few blocks away, where Zoe’s parents lived, but not together. The whole situation was a complicated mess. Sometimes Jeremy was glad he didn’t have friends who might ask embarrassing questions about his family.

  Gabe was the sole connection between the two households. Not that there was much contact beyond occasional self-conscious play dates at the playground in Forest Park so the brothers could get to know each other. Tim tried to teach Gabe to keep the bat level when he swung at the ball, but Gabe never liked baseball much. Jeremy and Tim might not know him that well, but Gabe was their half-brother and he was begging for their help with his birthday party.

  Pushing through the crowd of students into the auditorium, Jeremy told himself to chill. This place wasn’t that different from UMass. He stood at the back of the amphitheater looking for Tim. The hall was a study in gray—rug, walls, metal tubing connecting gunmetal chairs to slate desks. The muted colors were soothing, but the steep pitch of the room played havoc with his balance, pulling him forward until he was poised to fall into the drab empty space. His body swayed and he grabbed onto the back of a chair in the last row. As the lights dimmed, he saw his brother’s windmilling arms and made his way to the seat Tim had saved. A woman stepped up to the podium and introduced herself as Greenhope, a senior in the Sustainability Studies department. Tim elbowed Jeremy and grinned, probably at her hot pink hair and matching high-top sneakers.

  “Global warming is real and it’s frightening,” the pink woman began. “But we must follow the facts in front of our faces, even when they’re harsh and ugly.”

  Tim leaned over and whispered, “Just what you need. More harsh and ugly. That nurse practitioner of yours wouldn’t approve.”

  Jeremy wasn’t sure what he needed, but the main speaker was neither harsh nor ugly and she captivated him with her first sentence. Dressed in a skirt and blouse, she looked more like an elementary education major than an activist type. “My name is Mary,” she said. “They call me an eco-terrorist.”

  Whoa. Jeremy leaned forward in his seat.

  “Civilization is a serial killer.” She sounded both regretful and determined. “Carbon dioxide levels are rising fast and methane is thawing—methane is a time bomb, much more destructive than CO2. Scientists estimate that over two hundred species a day are becoming extinct. Now. As we speak. Is this how we treat our distant cousins?”

  Exactly, Jeremy thought. He looked at Tim, hoping his brother was excited by these ideas too, but Tim was reading a text.

  “These species,” Mary continued, “the insects and plants and animals, are our kin.”

  Yes, Jeremy thought. This was personal. Take Thismia americana, dying the year he was born. That connected them. Thismia could be a distant cousin, a long-lost great-uncle.

  “Sometimes nature fights back, like the elephants in Cameroon. When ivory traders destroyed the elephants’ habitats and used hand grenades to slaughter their herds, the animals began attacking villages in response.” She paused and the audience’s attention swelled. “Smaller animals can’t do that. Plants can’t do that.” Her voice became
a whisper in the microphone. “But we can do it for them.”

  Jeremy listened to every word, without crossing his legs or fidgeting on the thinly padded gray chair or glancing to see what Tim thought. No, listen wasn’t the accurate word, not strong enough. Mary’s words tunneled into his flesh, swam in his bloodstream, and sidled up to every circulating cell, already seeded with vigils of Latin deaths. Her sentences inserted into his DNA. He couldn’t stop looking at her, at Mary the eco-terrorist. Why didn’t she deny that awful title? How did she become so sure of herself?

  “You may wonder,” she said, clearly able to read his mind, “about the eco-terrorist label. That’s how the folks in power attempt to demonize people who challenge their self-serving lies. They portray us as bogeymen.” She grinned. “Bogeywomen.”

  He liked her smile, her ability to joke about such a desperate situation.

  “The big fossil fuel companies run the show. They write the laws that make it legal to rape our planet and plunder its natural resources. Biodiversity is vanishing. Thousands of species are becoming extinct. The energy companies and their buddies in government are massively powerful. We must fight back with everything we have.”

  Mary crossed her hands over her heart and looked around the audience, her intense gaze stopping on individuals for brief moments. Look at me, Jeremy thought.

  “Please join us. Join me. Dedicate yourselves to saving our planet,” she said quietly. “For ourselves. For our children. For the whole earth of connected living organisms. Thank you.”

  Jeremy stood and clapped wildly with the audience. He swayed, lightheaded and dizzy. He realized he’d been holding his breath.

  Tim punched him in the shoulder. “Didn’t I tell you? Right up your alley.”

  Jeremy nodded. He couldn’t speak, even if he really needed to, even if he had to yell fire or something critical and life-saving. His brain was ablaze from her words, as if they held a match to the dry tinder of all those dead plants he held inside and ignited, exploding into flame. The oddest part was that what she said also expanded him, stretched his skin wide open to let these other people in, all these other people who also mourned the dying and wanted to help. His brother was looking at him oddly, expecting some sort of verbal response, but he couldn’t make conversation out of a conflagration.

  Standing on the sidewalk after the lecture, Tim suggested they head over to the burrito joint. “The people who organized the program will be there. Pink girl and Carl and Sari and others.”

  “I’d rather go home,” Jeremy said. “Back to your place.”

  “I mentioned your radio show to some friends,” Tim said. “They want to meet you.”

  Well, they weren’t actually his friends; none of his buddies from the business school had shoulder-length hair or nose studs, but he knew Carl from freshman dorm. Tim wondered if introducing Jeremy to the eco-nuts was a smart idea, but he had to do something to shake his bro out of his solitary funk. He liked the idea of Jeremy as part of a group, any group, and this one seemed harmless, despite their rhetoric.

  “Nah,” Jeremy said. “I don’t think so.”

  “Mary will be there.” Tim grinned. He’d noticed how Jeremy stared at her.

  “Just for a few minutes then.”

  Tim had to practically drag his brother into the line at the counter of the crowded restaurant and then push him into an empty chair with their food.

  “This is Carl.” Tim punched the shoulder of a guy with a ponytail who looked like he lifted weights, then pointed to the dark-haired woman next to Carl. “That’s Sari.”

  “Tim told us about your radio show,” Carl said, wiping salsa verde from his chin. “Sounds amazing. We don’t have anything like that here.”

  Jeremy shrugged. “It’s just about species that are threatened or going extinct.”

  “It is amazing,” Tim said, crossing his fingers under the table. “Don’t be so modest. Music and chanting all these Latin names.”

  “Maybe you could do a program like that here,” Sari suggested. “We’ve got a college station.”

  “I’m not a student here,” Jeremy said. “Besides, the UMass station master didn’t like it. They shut me down.”

  “Exactly!” Carl banged the table. “That’s what Mary was talking about, how they attack us when we organize around environmental issues.”

  “Nah,” Jeremy said. “My show wasn’t political.”

  Sari touched his arm. “It so was, Jeremy. Everything about the environment is political.”

  Someone brought two pitchers of beer and that changed the subject, so Jeremy was off the hook. Mary never showed up.

  “Let’s go,” Jeremy said when he finished eating. As he and Tim left the restaurant, Sari touched Jeremy’s arm again.

  “We’re meeting with Mary tomorrow at 4:00, to plan our next action. Why don’t you join us?”

  Carl glanced sharply at Sari, raising his eyebrows. “Too soon,” he mouthed.

  Sari shook her head slightly at him. “It’s okay, Carl. He’s okay, the radio show and everything.” She turned back to Jeremy. “Please. Join us.”

  “Maybe,” Jeremy said. “I’ll think about it.”

  The brothers were quiet on the train, but later, climbing the stairs at Borough Hall, Tim interrupted Jeremy’s thoughts. “That’s cool, that they invited you to a meeting. I hear they’re usually pretty paranoid. Secret handshakes and crap. You going to go?”

  “I don’t know.” He slowed his steps and turned to Tim. “I’m not sure I’d be comfortable with your friends.”

  “Those guys? They’re not my friends. Just some people I know a little.” Tim paused. “My friends are like me, business majors.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Jeremy said.

  “About what?”

  “You being a business major. Isn’t that strange, what with our family and everything? I mean, couldn’t you at least study sustainable business or something? Green business?”

  Tim laughed. “Don’t you get it? That’s the point. I don’t want anything to do with what happened to us. I’m building a new life, one that’s all mine.”

  “And all white?” Jeremy asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your friends. Are they all white?”

  “Yeah. Aren’t yours?”

  “I don’t have that many friends,” Jeremy admitted. “But they’re like me, brown or mixed, mostly. Tomas is Puerto Rican. Danny is Korean-American.”

  Tim shrugged.

  A few minutes later, Jeremy broke the silence. “Speaking of brothers, did you see the email from Gabe?”

  “Half-brother. You mean about his birthday party?”

  “Yeah. So are we going to help him? It’s in two weeks.”

  “I’m not sure,” Tim said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it means getting in the middle of that mess again. Dad and Mom and Pippa and her new family.”

  “That’s the point. They’re family.”

  “I guess,” Tim said.

  They lapsed into silence. As they walked, Jeremy murmured under his breath, Fitchia mangarevensis. Dryopteris ascensionis. The sounds soothed him, slowed his breathing. The Latin names burrowed through his pores and into his cells like a sedative. They waited for the light at Atlantic.

  “You ever think about them?” Jeremy asked.

  “Them?”

  “Abby and Terrence.”

  They almost never spoke about their siblings, half-siblings, whose deaths in Forest Park started the cascade that ended with Pippa leaving and their dad going to prison and the commune breaking up. He and Tim had been shielded from most of the ugliness and the trial, but he had some clear memories, like the night Abby was born.

  The Pioneer Street greenhouse had shimmered with candlelight and the smell of damp earth. All night, while Murphy played music and Tian and Francie chanted and the midwife spoke softly to Pippa, Tim and he sat under the planting table building castles from wooden blocks
and catnapping. He remembered putting his lips close to Pippa’s stretched out belly button and telling Abby to hurry up, promising to teach her to draw. At eight, he had already filled notebooks with pictures of plants and flowers.

  What bothered Jeremy most was that he couldn’t remember the babies’ faces. Sure, it happened years ago, but how could a person forget something like that?

  “Won’t you ever let it go? Tim said. “Aren’t dying plants bad enough?”

  Chapter Seven

  That same early April evening, Flo pushed her bike into the wooden lean-to behind her apartment building, where the landlord grudgingly allowed her to park. Even if it weren’t a clunky old-fashioned model—just like she was—there was no way she could carry a bike to the second floor. She wove the chain through the spokes and around the drainpipe and snapped the lock shut, spinning the numbers. She had a moment of panic that she would never remember the combination. Then she reminded herself that the numbers were written in indelible ink inside her left sneaker. What would happen, she worried, when she forgot the back-up plan? Disaster, that’s what.

  Flo saw disasters everywhere. She always had. She collected them and deconstructed them into their worrisome component parts. Starting in eighth grade when her best friend’s mom died of breast cancer, Flo made mental lists every night before falling asleep. Lists of potential catastrophes poised to derail her and her family. She planned her responses too: how she would cope if her father lost his job or her mother fell into an inexplicable coma or their house collapsed into one of those giant sinkholes they had down in Florida, possible even though they lived in Maryland. Over the years, Flo grew to firmly believe that this mental exercise would prevent ruin, but only if she imagined each one specifically. It was an endless task and one she took seriously. But when it came, the calamity wasn’t a sinkhole or a falling air conditioner. It was in her head and it stole her ability to inventory and list and plan and respond.

  Trudging up the stairs, she acknowledged that her son probably considered her bike a disaster. At least once a week he begged her to donate the old contraption to Goodwill and stop risking life and limb. That was easy for him to say. Her two-speed bike, with its wicker basket and simple backpedal braking system, had carried her around town for over forty years, thanks to the elderly mechanic on Orange Street who kept it lubricated and working. Her evening ride around the central circuit in Forest Park was a better soporific than any of those stupid pills waiting to expire on the medicine cabinet shelf.