Kinship of Clover

by Ellen Meeropol

  He backed out of Flo’s room. He couldn’t do this. He’d take a quick look at the rest of the apartment, just so he could tell his mom he checked, but there was nothing here to save. Nothing to bring comfort. In the kitchen, his foot kicked something hard and sent it skittering across the burnt and curled linoleum floor. Probably one of poor Charlie’s toys, he thought, bending over to pick it up.

  Not a cat toy; nothing recognizable. A bumpy blob of melted something, maybe a paperweight? Had the cat been playing with it? Sam spit on the blob and rubbed it against his T-shirt. Under the thick soot coating, emerald green appeared, and purple. They were marbles, fused together by the fire into a lump of glass.

  There was a soft knock on the apartment door. Sam put the destroyed marbles into his pocket and squished across the rug to answer it.

  Mimi wasn’t sure why she needed to see Flo’s apartment, except for her profound regret that she didn’t come over that Saturday evening when Flo had sounded so out of it and hung up on her and then wouldn’t answer the phone. Of course Mimi should have gone over, should have checked on her best friend, should have at least called Sam. Flo could have died in that fire. Mimi would never forgive herself for doing nothing.

  Now, she looked at Sam. Tears had washed lines through his soot-smeared cheeks. She opened her arms.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I should have come that night. I could have prevented this. This is all my fault.”

  Sam stepped back, out of Mimi’s arms. “Of course not. Something like this was inevitable. You know that.”

  Mimi walked to the middle of the living room and looked around. “I had no idea it was this bad.” She opened the coffee table drawer and took out a framed photo, blackened and charred. The soot smudged when she tried to wipe it off with her hand. “That’s Flo and me, the year we met,” she said. “Can I keep this?”

  “Sure,” Sam said. “Take anything you can salvage.” He hesitated. “Listen, I have a question. Did you know anything about Charlie?”

  “The cat?”

  “No. The man. Ma’s lover.” His voice broke. “She says he’s my father.”

  Mimi shook her head. A lover? How could Flo have kept a secret like that, all these years? If that were true, she’d be furious at Flo. If she weren’t already overwhelmed with guilt and sorrow.

  “I never knew about any guy named Charlie.”

  “Me neither,” Sam said. “It’s probably just the dementia speaking.”

  When he got home, Sam scrubbed the marble blob with dish soap and water, dried it carefully, and put it on his desk, next to his computer. It was grotesque, how the different colored marbles kept their basic spherical shape but their edges melted into each other. Beautiful too, in a way, and the only salvageable thing from her apartment.

  He was procrastinating. He had promised to visit Flo this morning. But first, what about Charlie? The guy was probably just a fantasy or a phantom, but Sam couldn’t stop thinking about him. He wanted to Google him, but couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. For one thing, what was he going to do with the information? Confront his mother? She’d been through enough recently, hadn’t she? On the other hand, if not now, when? She wasn’t getting any better. Every week she lost a little more of herself.

  Besides, he didn’t know where to start. Well, that wasn’t true. He had a few clues, facts that Flo had mentioned weeks ago in connection with Charlie: Glen Echo. 1960. Picketing. Of course, that was before she said who Charlie really was, and 1960 seemed so long ago. Irrelevant. At least, that’s what he’d thought.

  Now, he put those keywords into the search field, hesitated for a moment, and pressed Enter. Easy as pie.

  He read old newspaper articles about Glen Echo, the segregated amusement park near Flo’s childhood home in Maryland. Howard University students picketed, whites from the local neighborhood joined them, and counter-demonstrators came from the American Nazi Party. He searched files of black and white photos, reading each picket sign and every caption. He never found his mother’s picture, not for sure, but there was one small, unidentified white face in a crowd shot that could have been a young Flo.

  There was only one Charles, a tall guy who showed up in almost every photo. The caption identified him as Charles Elwood Anderson, a student at Howard and one of the picket organizers.

  Charles was black.

  Sam looked at down his hands, his skin dark against the white keyboard. Then he typed Charles Elwood Anderson into the search engine.

  Flo closed her eyes to concentrate better on the radio program. She had heard about this research a few years ago and she understood it perfectly then, but either the science was getting murkier or her brain was. The reporter was saying that fetal cells circulate in a mother’s bloodstream for decades after a pregnancy. It wasn’t clear if these cells helped the mother, or hurt her, but they stuck around, even after the children grew up and moved away or even died. In one case, hundreds of fetal cells in a woman’s liver cured her hepatitis or maybe it was pancreatitis, at least Flo thought that’s what he said. Even if she got it wrong, it didn’t matter. What mattered was she wasn’t alone. Even when she could no longer talk with him, when she stopped recognizing his dear face—it was impossible to believe that could ever happen—Sam’s cells would roam her veins, keeping her company. She wouldn’t be alone.

  “Knock knock.” Sam’s voice filled the doorway.

  She didn’t answer. Walking into her room, Sam couldn’t tell if Flo was awake or asleep. She was curled up in bed and the radio volume turned up loud. She looked a decade older than before the fire, just two weeks ago. She was aging fast. Not so much in body but in her brain certainly, and maybe in her soul, if such a thing existed. Suddenly he wished that Zoe had come or that Anna were next to him, holding his hand.

  He turned down the volume on the radio and Flo opened her eyes.

  “Got two things for you, Ma.” He leaned down to kiss her cheek. “A present and a question.”

  Flo smiled. “I like presents.”

  He sat on the edge of her bed and reconsidered. Should he give her the marble blob? Would it please her or upset her, making concrete the damage from the fire? Why would she want it now, when the marbles and what they represented offended her before?

  “I went to your apartment, to try to save some of your things.” He touched her hand. “But the fire destroyed pretty much everything.”

  “Everything,” she echoed.

  He nodded, then handed her the blob of multicolored glass. “It burned so hot. Look what it did to the bag of marbles I gave you.”

  She held it on the palm of her hand and stared, turning her hand this way and that. The morning light from the window flashed a prism of jewel colors onto the wall. Flo moved the glass so that the colors danced.

  “So pretty,” she said.

  Sam closed his eyes. She didn’t know what it was, didn’t remember. No way would she be able to talk coherently about Charlie. Still, he had to try.

  “Now the question.” He moved to the bedside chair. Giving her space would be good, right? “Tell me about my father.”

  She rubbed her thumb across the marble glass, polishing the surface. “Brad died. Don’t you remember?”

  “Not Brad. Tell me about Charlie.”

  Flo smiled. “I loved him very much.”

  I loved Charlie and I was a coward, Flo thought. She didn’t realize she spoke the words aloud until Sam answered.

  “Coward? You’re the bravest person I know.”

  That was not true. A brave person would have told Charlie about the pregnancy. A brave person would not crawl back to her old boyfriend and move north with him. A brave person would not lie to Sam about his father or keep the whole awful, wonderful thing from her best friend. Those were the acts of a coward.

  Some things, some people, you know all your life, Flo thought, and they were true and solid and you trusted they would never change. Like Sam. Like Zoe. Like the memory of Charlie. So real, so sweet,
so necessary.

  But then they do change. People and places begin to unravel a bit at the edges, to fray like linen napkins washed too many times. The people were still there but not in sharp focus. The memories soften and begin to dissolve. Flo had always known that life could implode in an instant, in a moment of inattention, a routine lab test. But she had believed that if she worried enough, if she imagined each catastrophe, it would be a talisman against it happening.

  She was wrong about that. Even with all her worrying, disaster arrived and she was unprepared. She could do nothing to stop it.

  Chapter Twenty

  Rolling her wheelchair past the piano of death, Zoe looked away from the framed photograph of a white-haired man with an oval mole on his cheek and a long list of accomplishments and community memberships. She felt sad for the man’s grandchildren and didn’t want to think about the day Flo’s existence would be reduced to an 8 × 11 frame on that shiny wood surface. She’d read about Alzheimer’s on the Internet and knew Flo could live for years. Her body could, at least.

  She took Jeremy’s hand. It was sweet of him to spend part of his Saturday visiting her grandmother. He said it was cool, that he really liked talking to Flo.

  Next to the elevator, the activity room was being set up with booths and tables, for some sort of festival or fair. Hillside Helps, announced the banner over the double doors.

  “Helps what?” Zoe asked.

  Jeremy read from a poster on the wall. “Get involved with the organizations that work to improve our community.”

  “Cool,” Zoe said. “Let’s bring Flo down. She’ll enjoy it.”

  Flo was sitting by the window in her room with a book closed in her lap. Her face lit up when Zoe and Jeremy entered. “Finally, some fun,” she said. “I’ve been here a month and this place bores me to tears.”

  “You’ve been here a week, Ma,” Sam said from his perch on the bed, computer on his lap.

  Flo waved his comment away. “Feels like a month. I’ve been here long enough to hate it. The people here smell bad.”

  Zoe rolled her eyes and wheeled close to hug her grandmother. “In any case, today will be fun. There’s a community fair downstairs.”

  Flo made a face. “Bunch of silly do-gooders.”

  Jeremy sat in the guest chair. “What’s wrong with doing good?”

  “Do you know the difference between liberal and radical, young man?”

  “Don’t get started, Ma,” Sam said.

  “The fellow asked me a question,” Flo said. “He deserves an answer.”

  Sam shrugged and turned back to his computer.

  “I’m not sure I know the difference you mean,” Jeremy said.

  Or that you really want to, Zoe thought.

  “It’s the difference between putting a band-aid on a gaping wound,” Flo said. “A wound like poverty or racism, versus trying to correct what caused the injury in the first place. Making that commitment and following through, no matter what the consequences.”

  Jeremy had spent a lot of time considering consequences. How children are often the collateral damage of their parents’ choices. Even if the parents mean well, even if the effects are hidden or subtle or dormant for decades. Not only the families of spies or serial murderers or drug dealers are at risk; the white picket fence can hide unforgivable error or neglect, pious fanaticism or cavernous sorrow. Kids are simultaneously fragile and resilient; who knows why one blooms in the dark and another withers in bright sunshine.

  Why was Tim so untouched by their shared past, why was he the one with obsessions about fragility, about extinction, the one with hallucinations—or whatever they were—of plants growing out of his fingertips? Not that he would give it up, not entirely, not all of it. Looking at Zoe, so comfortable with herself despite how she was born, he wondered if he’d ever feel normal.

  “Do you really mean that?” Jeremy asked Flo. “Because the consequences can be huge.”

  Flo’s face had slackened and she didn’t answer. Zoe told him on the phone that Flo was in and out of lucidity, sometimes floating off in the middle of a sentence. Too bad, because Jeremy really wanted to know the answer to his question and he didn’t know that many people to ask besides Flo. Mary maybe. If he ever had the chance to talk to her again.

  “What happened to you?” Flo asked without opening her eyes. “To make you ask about consequences?”

  What could he tell this old woman? That Tian and Francie had lived their utopian dream, trying to repair the social damage they observed around them. Was it their fault that their dream became his nightmare?

  “Bad things happened to my family when I was nine,” Jeremy said. He was nine and hiding in the snowy woods with Tim, watching the cops kick and beat his dad, drown the bonfire, cuff and take away all the members of his family. “When you’re a kid and bad happens, it sticks to you like superglue. Forever.”

  “But Jeremy …” Sam started.

  “I know, Sam,” Jeremy said. “You were there, with your crazy mustache, and you saved us and I’m really grateful. But nothing can erase what happened. It was like growing up in a war zone.”

  Zoe reached for Jeremy’s hand. “Or like being a mutant.”

  Jeremy nodded. “That’s right. Mutants are people who feel different and discarded. They’ve been pushed away and live on the edge of things.”

  Flo’s eyes snapped open. “That’s the lumpenproletariat,” she said. “The only way to get power is to fight back, organize yourselves.”

  “I don’t know about the lumpen-people,” Jeremy said, “but Zoe and I are inheriting a world that is self-destructing. Even if I want to do the expected thing—get a good job, have a family—what’s the use? Our kids will grow up to environmental catastrophe.” Jeremy blushed furiously on the word kids, avoiding Zoe’s gaze. “How fair is that?” he said, looking at the floor.

  “Who ever told you life was fair?” Flo asked.

  Sam stood up. “This is fascinating, Ma. But let’s all go downstairs and check out the fair before lunch.”

  Sam had to sign his mother out of the Memory Unit before punching in the four-digit elevator code. He knew the reason for the precautions, but when Flo muttered, “prison,” he couldn’t disagree. Still, she was safe here. No more wandering off and forgetting where she lived. No more fires.

  Downstairs, the activity room was crowded. Every non-profit in town had a table, from homeless vets to domestic abuse, from global warming to civil liberties. Zoe and Flo wandered together from display to display and Sam followed, trying not to lose sight of them. He didn’t know whether to hope his mother got involved with something or worry that she would join a group and let loose her particular brand of bossy passion on the unsuspecting members.

  While his mother and daughter chatted with a ponytailed man about the battered women’s shelter, Sam joined Jeremy at the climate change booth.

  “There’s great stuff here,” Jeremy said, holding a flyer from 350.org. “These guys have a chapter at UMass and I went to my first meeting on Tuesday.”

  Zoe wheeled up to them, Flo leaning heavily on the wheelchair. “Grandma’s tired of walking. Time for lunch.”

  Two young women holding clipboards flanked the exit. One stepped forward and asked, “Can you spare a moment for reproductive rights?”

  Sam glanced at his mother, whose face was turning a deep red. Uh-oh. He had a bad feeling about this.

  “How dare you?” Flo voice cascaded to a scream. “Look at you, you babies, asking me if I can spare a moment for reproductive rights? Do you have any fucking clue what we faced, how hard we fought to gain those rights you’re talking about?”

  Flo snatched the woman’s clipboard and raised it like a club, then threw it at the two women, who cowered while the clipboard clattered across the tile floor.

  “It’s okay, Ma.” Sam put his arm around Flo and tried to swivel her away from the women. Jeremy picked up the clipboard and handed it to its owner.

  “It’s not
okay. It’s insulting.” Flo slapped at Sam’s hands.

  “Sorry,” murmured the young woman clutching the clipboard to her chest. The other canvasser looked stunned.

  Zoe grabbed her grandmother’s hand and tugged. “Let’s get lunch. I’m famished.”

  Flo turned back to the two young women. “Feh. You know nothing.” Spittle sprayed with the force of her words. “Nothing.”

  Trixie appeared at Flo’s side. “Is there a problem, dear?”

  “I’m not your dear and yes, there’s a problem. These insulting, stupid girls know nothing.” Flo started walking toward the elevator, Zoe and Jeremy hurrying after her.

  “I’m so sorry,” Sam said to Trixie and the young women.

  Trixie patted his arm. “You don’t have to apologize, Mr. Tobin. It’s the disease.”

  Sam wanted to be alone, to weep, but he had to pay attention. The director was still talking.

  “This kind of aggressive symptomatology is not uncommon,” Trixie said. “Unfortunately this is not the first incident with your mother. We have to consider the safety and tranquility of our community. I suspect that when Dr. Robertson hears about this, he’ll decide it’s time to begin the psychotropic medication he mentioned to you.”

  After the incident with Flo and the canvassers, lunch was anything but cheerful. Sam dropped Zoe and Jeremy off at the library and went home. Instead of going upstairs and finishing building a website for the new Asian fusion restaurant at the X, he rang the downstairs doorbell. Sam hated to ask Emily for medical advice but he didn’t know where else to turn. She was a nurse, even if she refused to administer to family.

  Anna answered the door. “Hey,” she said. “How’s your mom?”

  “Not great,” Sam said. “That’s why I’m here. I’m worried. Is Emily home?”