Kinship of Clover

by Ellen Meeropol

  “I don’t know,” Jeremy said. “I only read the main one, and saw the movie.”

  “I’ve got all the books. You could borrow a couple. They’re downstairs, in my mom’s apartment. I always have Sunday breakfast with my mom. Maybe you could come tomorrow, if you have time before your bus. You know, so you can take a look at the books.”

  Sam couldn’t help smiling. Where did Zoe learn these moves?

  “Sure, but I don’t know if I’ll like the Oz stories. I was more into the X-Men. Tim and I must’ve read every comic book and seen every movie a dozen times. Our bedroom wall was covered with their posters.”

  “Really? Those mutant characters—that one-eyed man and the girl who makes storms, right? Oh, and the guy with the knife hands?”

  “That’s Wolverine. You should give them a chance. The stories are all about good and evil, about prejudice and racism.”

  There was a silence, then Jeremy spoke again. “You know, I’m kind of like a mutant myself. My dad’s an ex-con, a felon. My mom worships an ancient Egyptian goddess. Five years ago, I would have given anything to attend Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, except that I had no superpower.”

  “You don’t seem like a mutant to me,” Zoe said, her voice both soft and teasing.

  Sam couldn’t quite take it in. His little girl sounded so adult, flirting with Jeremy, drawing him out. A surge of memories pushed Sam deeper into the hallway. Breathtaking memories. Little girl memories of spoonerisms and stretching exercises and purple headbands and finger puppets and that silly stuffed rhino she couldn’t sleep without—what was his name? Rufus, that was it. Where was Rufus now?

  There was another silence and this one went on and on until Sam couldn’t stand it. He peeked quickly around the corner into the living room.

  Zoe sat close to the boy. Their arms were entwined and their faces close. Kissing.

  Sam closed his eyes and listened hard. Okay, eavesdropped. A father’s right and his responsibility.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Walking to Zoe’s mother’s house the next morning, Jeremy realized he was whistling. Whistling meant happy. Weekend visits home weren’t usually happy; normally he couldn’t stand more than an hour at a time of his father’s inarticulate grimness or his mother’s palpable anxiety. Like when he got home from Zoe’s the night before and Francie was waiting up for him with a barrage of questions.

  “When are you moving back home? You’re not dropping out of school, are you? Why didn’t you call us when you freaked out and were sent to Health Services? Why’d you go to Brooklyn?”

  Luckily his dad was already asleep. Francie was much easier to placate than Tian would have been, Tian with his sad eyes and snapping rubber bands. Jeremy explained that he had to be in Brooklyn for Earth Day but planned to return to UMass in a couple of weeks. He might have to take an incomplete or two, but he could make up the work over the summer. He didn’t actually know he’d made the decision to leave Brooklyn, but when he spoke the words, Francie let up with the third degree and he felt his chest relax and soften. Tim would be so relieved.

  But none of that would make him whistle. So it had to be Zoe.

  Did that make him a major loser? Falling for a sixteen-year-old girl stuck in a wheelchair. If anyone had told him a year ago that he’d feel this way about a girl who had to pee through a catheter, he would have laughed. Not that Zoe had told him about that, but he had read all about spina bifida on the Internet. No way, he would have said. But a year ago he didn’t know Zoe.

  He stood facing Zoe’s house, with the stairs and wheelchair lift to her dad’s second floor apartment on the left. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, his thoughts bouncing back and forth between wanting to stay in Massachusetts with his plants and Zoe, and the pull of Earth Day at the Brooklyn courthouse. Either way, he wouldn’t let the plants down.

  But first, there was breakfast with Zoe and her mom. He’d ring the doorbell in just a minute.

  Zoe glanced at the kitchen clock. She hoped Jeremy wasn’t one of those chronically late people. Sometimes her friend Xander did it on purpose, because he knew it pissed her off. But Jeremy wasn’t like that, was he? Didn’t he understand how stressful it was for her to introduce him to her mom? Anna had always been the hard-nose parent, tough and demanding, and Sam the softy. How could Jeremy keep her waiting like this?

  “Relax,” Anna said. “He’s probably standing on the sidewalk out front, not wanting to appear too eager.”

  “Come on, Mom. He’s not that insecure.” Or was he? How much did she really know about the guy, other than he liked those mutant characters and how easy he was to talk with? And the taste of his tongue. She blushed and turned away, taking an extra mug from the cupboard. “I wonder if he likes coffee.”

  “Maybe make a pot of tea too?” Anna said.

  Zoe put the teapot on the table, then looked at her mother. “Hey, where are Pippa and Gabe?”

  “They wanted breakfast at the diner.”

  “Really? Not so that you can interrogate Jeremy without interference?”

  Anna smiled. “You invited him, Sweetie. I just want to get to know him a little. Your first real boyfriend.”

  “Come on, Mom. I’m sixteen.”

  “Only a couple of years younger than I was when I met Sam.”

  “And look how well that worked out.”

  “Don’t worry,” Anna said. “I promise not to embarrass you. By the way, I heard your Jeremy is planning to return to UMass in a couple of weeks.”

  Zoe spun her wheelchair around to face her mom. “How did you hear that? He didn’t tell me. And he’s not my Jeremy.”

  “Relax,” Anna said. “His mom mentioned it when she called this morning to thank me for hosting Gabe’s birthday party.”

  “Then why didn’t he tell me?”

  Anna took Zoe’s hand and squeezed. “Don’t expect too much of boys in the communication department.”

  “Dad’s pretty good at talking.”

  “They get better with age, if you can hang in there.”

  Zoe pulled her hand back. She hated it when her mom talked that way, woman to woman, as if they shared a way of looking at the world because of their gender. Just because her parents failed at marriage didn’t mean all relationships were doomed. Jeremy had been so easy to talk with the night before. So why would he keep something important from her, like moving back?

  Jeremy followed Zoe into the kitchen. The air felt charged and not in a good way.

  “You didn’t tell me you were moving back,” Zoe blurted.

  He looked at her in surprise. She sounded irked, like he should have already told her. But he didn’t decide until after he left the night before, so how could he?

  “I didn’t actually make the decision until late last night,” he said, then added, “after you and I talked about it. My mom ambushed me when I got home. But I’m still going back to Brooklyn with Tim this afternoon, so I can be part of Earth Day next weekend.”

  “Coffee?” Anna held the carafe over his cup. He nodded. “What’s the purpose of the Earth Day event?”

  Jeremy grinned. “Depends on who you ask. Some people want their colleges to divest from oil and gas companies, others want the borough to beef up recycling and emissions regs, and still others think that organizing around global warming is the way to move the US toward socialism. Take your pick.”

  “What about you?” Anna tilted her head slightly to the side with the question.

  Anna’s gesture zoomed him right back to the evening before, when Zoe cocked her head that way while they danced. He felt his face flush and took a sip of coffee even though it was too hot and he hated it without milk and sugar. Zoe had done that thing with her head right before she touched the curls on his neck and then he touched her hair and it came alive, all green and growing like vines down his arms and into his skin. Amazing that Zoe and her mom had the same gesture. Or maybe it wasn’t so amazing because of genetics, but he couldn
’t think of anything he did that mirrored his folks. Or he didn’t want to.

  “Jeremy?” Zoe asked.

  His face flushed again. Blazed, it felt like. “Sorry, I was thinking about something,” he mumbled, then turned to Anna. “What did you ask me?”

  “About Earth Day?”

  “Yeah. To be honest, I’m not exactly sure what I think. I’m still trying to figure it out. I can see all the perspectives, but I care about vanishing plant species.” He shrugged. “Not as interesting as divestiture or revolution, I guess.”

  “You’re a biology major, right?” Anna asked. “What will you do when you get back to school?”

  “Take botany courses. Drawing classes when I can fit it in. I’ve got to catch up on the work I missed, but I’d really like to learn about permaculture and sustainability studies.”

  “I bet there’s a global warming action group on campus,” Zoe said. “We’ve got one at my high school.”

  He smiled at Zoe. “Yeah. I’ll look into that.” Jeremy reached for the sugar bowl. “But first there’s Earth Day.”

  The next Saturday, the demonstration turned off Atlantic and stretched down Court Street as far as Jeremy could see. He teetered on the curb, searching, but saw no sign of Carl or Sari or Greenhope or the five-foot-long climate change banner he’d helped paint the night before. The banner was striking—floods and blizzards and tornados whipped across the canvas of water-starved fields and crumbling city blocks. His major contribution was a border of leaves of dead species resurrected to frame the devastation, to illustrate the coming catastrophe. Stem-like green letters formed the words “Biodiversity is shrinking,” woven among the broken branches. He was proud of his work, even though he expected no one would appreciate the attention to detail or recognize the accuracy of the drawing.

  He stood on tiptoe and looked north toward Borough Hall—maybe he missed them. Maybe he should go home. Well, to Tim’s. Or he could try to catch up with them for the sit-in. Except that he couldn’t make up his mind whether or not to be arrested.

  It was too warm for April and the air shimmered. His mouth was dry and he was thirsty. Maybe he could grab a bottle of water from one of these stores before joining the march.

  A troop of drummers marched by, their explosive syncopated thumps so insistent that they hijacked his heartbeat. Too loud. Too intense. He turned away and elbowed through the crowd of gawkers, trying to imagine how Zoe would maneuver her wheelchair in the crush of people.

  “Hey, Jerry. Over here.”

  “Jerk,” he muttered. Carl thought calling him Jerry was funny. Carl was an ass.

  Carl and Sari leaned against a brick wall near the corner of Court and Livingston, a large backpack between them on the sidewalk.

  “Where’s the banner?” Jeremy asked. “And the rest of the committee?”

  “Borough Hall lobby,” Sari said. “Waiting for the marchers to arrive for the rally and civil disobedience.”

  “Are you marching?”

  “Soon,” Carl said. “We’ll meet you there.”

  “You got any water?” Jeremy asked.

  “In the pocket.” Sari pointed to the backpack and Jeremy reached for the zipper.

  “Not inside!” Sari’s whisper was fierce. She grabbed his hand and pulled a water bottle from the side pocket. “Here.”

  Jeremy stared at her, frozen by her fury. What could she have in the pack that was so secret? Her words from the burrito bar exploded in his head, flung him back into his boy’s body to that prison visiting room, to the look on his father’s face, half despair and half ferocity and totally scary.

  “No, thanks,” he said to the air as he hurried up the hill to Court Street, away from Carl and Sari and his father and the guard and the prison visiting room.

  His heart was still racing fifteen minutes later as he rearranged his butt on the linoleum floor of the courthouse lobby and wished for more natural padding. Nothing much was happening at the moment and he was grateful for that. He had found Greenhope and Tommy and they’d draped the banner around their bodies so the message and the border of painted leaves were visible. The uniformed cops stood in straight lines against the lobby walls, helmets and shields ready. They stared at the protestors while the suits with ear buds conferred. Jeremy wondered what they were thinking. Greenhope ignored them and watched streaming news coverage of Earth Day events around the country on her tablet, complaining that each of them looked bigger and more exciting than their puny college sit-in.

  A cop wearing a black NYPD-stenciled vest stepped out of the huddle of suits and raised an electronic bullhorn to his lips. A thin squeal became static and then words. “You are trespassing. This is your last opportunity to leave the building. In five minutes, we will begin arresting those individuals who persist in breaking the law.”

  Tommy got up to leave. “My wife will kill me if I get busted again,” he said.

  Jeremy still hadn’t decided. Stay or go? Even if they won their demands and the university agreed to divest their fossil fuel holdings, thousands more species would become extinct in the meantime.

  Greenhope pulled her hat lower over her face and elbowed him. “You staying?”

  He shrugged. It didn’t matter, not really, but he had to decide. “What’s with the hat?” he asked, more to buy time than because he wanted to know.

  “It’s a cloche. It was my mom’s,” Greenhope said. “I always wear it to demonstrations. But don’t change the subject. What are you going to do?”

  Jeremy had no idea. What good would it do to get arrested? Tian said that civil disobedience delivered people right into the clutches of the system. But it was also a badge of honor to the students crowded into the courthouse. Flo would be proud of him. Maybe Zoe too. The thought made him smile.

  “Getting busted is not for everyone,” Greenhope said, leaning close. “I mean, maybe you’ve got a good reason to leave. Like you’re wanted for arms smuggling in Omaha or you’re the single parent of infant twins and the babysitter has to leave at five sharp.”

  “Nope,” Jeremy said. “Neither of those.” Did having a sort-of girlfriend back in Springfield count?

  “This isn’t a game, you know. This is life and death and you’ve got to choose. Are you with us, or not? I mean, if it’s just that you’re scared, welcome to the club. Everyone in this room is scared and every one of us is worried that we’ll lose our scholarship or daddy won’t keep paying tuition or a police record will follow us all the days of our lives and we’ll never get a good job and be able to retire in Florida.”

  She paused for breath, but continued before Jeremy could respond. “You know, Brooklyn will be as warm as Florida in a few years anyway. Beachfront, even. So I’m staying right here.” She patted the floor. “You?”

  He shrugged. He couldn’t decide.

  “You’ve probably heard horror stories about what can happen in jail, especially if they think you’re a troublemaker. But it’s not that bad and we’ve got to take a stand. What’s more important than this, than our Earth?”

  Jeremy pictured his father’s empty eyes in the visiting room and the incessant snapping of rubber bands. Greenhope didn’t know the half of it.

  “Holy shit.” Greenhope pointed to her tablet.

  A large photograph of Mary filled the screen, her round-collared blouse incongruous with the handcuffs and SWAT cops flanking her. DOMESTIC TERRORIST ARRESTED IN BOMBING screamed the headline.

  Bombing? Mary? He tried to read the story but his eyes blurred. He pictured Mary and her elementary education clothes and her story about the elephants in Cameroon getting revenge. “An eco-terrorist,” she had said. But she had a little boy—didn’t Carl say she had a son—and what would happen to the kid? Did he have a dad?

  “You okay?” Greenhope asked. “Your face is white.”

  This time, it was different. He recognized the foreshadowing of the green tingle, like the migraine aura his mom described. Different in another way too, because the plants were gr
owing inside his body this time. They germinated in the muscle fibers of his forearms and grew their way through the mesh of tendons in his wrists, their insistent sprouts stiffening in his fingers, joint by joint. Stems pieced the skin at the end of each tender fingertip and pushed through. Leaves unfurled in quick-time, urgent with the need to find sunlight and grow.

  He recognized a few of the leaf patterns, like Sterculia khasiana and Wikstroemia villosa, but most of them were strangers, unknown and exotic species.

  “Welcome,” he whispered to the newcomers.

  “Time’s up,” the officer with the bullhorn said. The lines of uniformed cops stepped forward, toward the seated protesters.

  “Jeremy?” Greenhope shook his shoulder, her voice worried. “You could probably still get out, if you want to leave. Are you sure?”

  He wasn’t frightened. This felt so right. He belonged here, in this forest of green crusaders woven together with the branches growing from his hands, the green vines twisting around the protestors’ arms and legs, sprouting deep green leaves perfect against their backpacks and hooded sweatshirts.

  “Save the earth,” people around him chanted. “We have no Plan B.”

  “Melicope paniculata,” he sang with them. “Ochrosia nukuhivensis.” He waved his arms high above his head, helping the resurrected plants reach for the sky. In the distance there was a loud answering boom, and he heard it as the voice of the universe joining in. “Centaurea pseudoleucolepis,” he responded.

  The cops began grabbing arms, dragging the protestors up from the floor, fastening plastic cuffs around their hands. He and Greenhope were tied together, by yellow plastic and the glorious tangles of vines, because the plants were everywhere by then.

  Greenhope whispered in his ear. “Did you hear that explosion?”

  He didn’t answer. The magnificent and heartbreaking architecture of extinct leaf patterns filled his ears and his head and the building and the world.

  “You need a shower,” Tim said Sunday morning. “I can’t believe you just spent a night in jail.”