All of Us with Wings

by Michelle Ruiz Keil

  Gina. The woman’s real name.

  “Hey, Ben,” Gina said. The two were silent after that. Ben turned up the radio and they both sang along.

  “‘Tiny Dancer’ reminds me of you,” Ben said when the song was over. “Every time I hear it.”

  Gina smiled from the back seat. They rode in silence for several blocks.

  “You’re quiet tonight,” Ben said. “You okay?”

  “Just tired.”

  When the taxi stopped, Gina pressed some bills into the driver’s hand. She opened the door. Peasblossom tensed. Getting out could be tricky.

  “Night, Ben,” she said, leaning in to extract a large bag. Peasblossom slipped out, using the bag as cover.

  Date palms rattled in the distance. He wrinkled his nose: chuparosa, jasmine, overripe trash. He was in the Mission, somewhere near Dolores Street.

  “Drive safe,” Gina called through the driver’s open window. “There’s a bunch of crazies out there tonight.”

  “Are they tipping?” Ben asked.

  “Mine were.” Gina grinned.

  Peasblossom hurried to relieve himself in a stand of bushes, hoping to follow the woman into her building. Charm should do the rest. But, like many things related to his aging body, the process took too long. When Peasblossom reached the lobby door, it was shut, his dreams of an elevator shattered. With any luck, Gina would live on a lower floor. He trotted to the back of the building, eyes on the fire escape. All the apartments were dark. Finally, light blazed in a sixth-story window. Groaning, Peasblossom began to climb.

  44

  Then She Remembers

  Gina dropped her bag in the coat closet and shucked off her good leather boots and designer jeans. Some girls came and went from the club in sweats and sneakers, but at thirty-four, Gina couldn’t afford to be careless.

  She turned the radio on low and opened a window to the cool night air. She was getting past her fears of open windows and evening walks. High up in the building, invisible in her little nest, supported by her own honest labor, paid for in cash, life felt almost normal. She poured a glass of wine, rolled a joint and ran a bath. She was about to pull off her T-shirt when she heard something. Did someone new move in with a baby? A blue-eyed cat sat in the window, tail puffed up, eyes all pupil.

  “Hey, handsome. Did you have a fight?”

  The cat meowed like it understood.

  “The window’s open, you know. You could come in. I’m not feeding you, now. I’m just offering some sanctuary. I know what it’s like to be on the run.”

  The cat meowed again, its voice rising at the end, a frustrated sound, but it stayed where it was. Gina made a show of ignoring it. Funny how alike people and animals were. When things were tough, even kindness could be hard to take. Well, either the cat would come in or it wouldn’t. She was going to take her bath.

  Gina lowered herself into the tub and lit a joint—Mexican, sadly, not Humboldt green. She yawned. This weed was stronger than she thought. She couldn’t remember ever being this relaxed. She closed her eyes and floated. The apartment was so quiet. Had she turned the radio off?

  She tried to get up and found she couldn’t. Fear bloomed in her belly, instantly calmed by the sensation of little hands in her hair. Her eyelids fluttered open, only to close immediately against what she saw. There was no one else in the apartment. No way was there a pair of big-eyed preschoolers standing at the edge of the tub. She must be dreaming. But that was wrong, too. She never dreamed of children. She avoided her triggers as best she could. Even her worst nightmares obeyed this primary rule in her life. But now forbidden thoughts crowded to the surface, and there was nothing she could do.

  Images came first: silky hair, big brown eyes. Next, the smell—café con leche and cinnamon toast. She waited for her body to react, to reject the poisonous guilt sure to come next.

  But nothing happened.

  A slideshow began in her brain.

  Memories that had been out of bounds for years slid noiselessly past: A dark, sexy boy slouching outside the 7-Eleven where Gina worked, plaid shirt buttoned up to his neck. A valentine with te amo written a hundred times. Both of them naked in the summer heat, singing with the radio to Gina’s huge belly. Manuel burning rubber on the way to the hospital. Xochi’s birth, hazy from the drugs Gina told them she didn’t want.

  After the hospital, a blank spot, a movie with a missing frame. Gina knew what was supposed to be there—her with a new baby in a rented room, greasy hair and zits from the hormones, all alone. The day, months later, when she ran into Manuel’s sister in Safeway. Where is he? Gina had begged. This is your niece, she’d pleaded. But Josie refused to look at the baby. Manny was in jail, she said in her cold bitch voice. Josie wouldn’t say more because Manuel asked her not to. He never wanted the baby in the first place. There was no point in asking their family for help. They all knew Gina was a trailer-trash whore. Now the family had bigger problems, and Gina’s brat was not going to be one of them.

  Gina had been called a whore before, and worse, by jealous girls and jilted boys. It sucked, of course, but she was never ashamed the way they wanted her to be. Josie’s words were different. But Gina didn’t cry. She picked up her baby and walked out of the store with her head held high, a single mother with a daughter to raise and a life to lead.

  Xochi’s childhood zoomed by: ugly suburbs, shitty jobs, credit-card trips to Disneyland she’d never pay off, the cardboard moving boxes gathered at yet another liquor store, the interchangeable guy with the truck volunteering to do the heavy lifting. So many times, this apartment, that condominium. A house for a brief moment of normalcy, then boxes again and another crappy cracker-box apartment. On and on her mind raced forward, night after night in bed alone, one-night stands, hot and sweet in the moment of conquest, always ending in her own coldness if they liked her too much.

  Evan had been different. Handsome, gentle Evan. There were no games, only tenderness when he cried in her arms that first night in his tent at the fair. And if the vast pot growing empire he’d bragged about was ten drafty cabins in the middle of green nowhere, for once Gina didn’t care. She loved him. She thought about giving him the baby he wanted. But what about her? She was already three years older than Evan. A baby guaranteed nothing. His fantasy of baby-makes-three would pass, and Xochi would grow up and move on and the two of them would live like they were meant to.

  Already, they were skimming money from the harvest profits, with Evan’s dad too drunk to know or care. Gina had a head for opportunity; she had plans for their business. She imagined a modern redwood house on the southeast hill, rainy seasons spent in Hawaii. She’d make damn sure she still looked good in a bikini for that. She got an IUD when he asked her to stop taking the pill and let him think a baby wasn’t in the stars for them. Then the thing got infected, and the jig was up. It made Gina so sick, she was in the hospital for a week.

  Evan’s rage at her lie was nothing she was prepared for. He’d never once raised his voice, and now his fists threatened to wreck her face. He ended things the day he forced himself on her when she said no, messed up from the infection, bruised from his blows. She knew where he hid his cash. She stole his dead stepmother’s Buick and drove away with one thought for Xochi: She’s becoming a woman. Who the hell am I to teach her about that?

  The bath was lukewarm now, but Gina’s skin was hot. Easing deeper into the soothing cool, she let the film reel continue to spin, surprised she felt nothing but a surface-level burning as the story unwound. The world wasn’t ending. The sky wouldn’t fall. Yes, the worst was true. She’d abandoned her own daughter. Facts were facts, plain and simple, summaries of actions taken. Bad, yes. Absolutely shameful, the thing she’d avoided like poison these last six years. But now, thinking about it was . . . nothing. A part of who she was, like her own skin.

  Next there was LA. She’d told everyone there she was twenty-th
ree, and no one batted an eye. Scott was forty and liked his women young. It wasn’t anything Gina had done that turned him against her—Scott was a lunatic in his own right. Gina was lucky to have gotten away alive. She let it all unspool: the stinging shame of the social workers, the weeks in the women’s shelter, but none of it penetrated the cool flicker of the pictures lapping at her brain like waves in a lake.

  It was easy to think of her first days in the city, the shabby hotel room she slunk into every day after a humiliating search for work, the ocean blue of the mural that called her into the Mitchell Brothers, the serendipity of her audition where she danced in a borrowed costume and the DJ chose her music. When the first familiar notes of her favorite song rang out of the speakers, Gina was born again. Comforted by the money piling up in her hand each night, amazed she had to do so little to earn it, she’d found a secret eddy, a way to avoid the destructive pull of her life and float free in a cool, sheltered cove.

  Cool like now, safe in this underwater cave that promised pleasant, easy sleep.

  Gina drifted, danger evaded, pursuers lost.

  And then she was hot. Way too hot.

  She groped for the porcelain bottom of the tub, but it wasn’t there.

  She opened her mouth to scream, but instead of sound, there was air, or something like it. She was underwater, but she was breathing. Deep, heavy breaths.

  She wanted to open her eyes, but before the impulse was fully formed, she was drifting again.

  A dream.

  A pair of naked, long-haired children.

  An abandoned industrial zone.

  Slight, pale-haired girls littered the barren landscape, broken orphans in varied stages of injury or decay. Some spat with rage, throwing rocks or pulling each other’s hair. Some sat motionless, humming to themselves. Others were painted in the crude likeness of women, flat chests caved inward, fingernails caked with blood.

  One was dressed like a soldier.

  She stood on top of a barbed wall, automatic weapon trained on the landscape below.

  The dream children approached like cautious dogs.

  “Stop right there,” the soldier girl said.

  The children knelt at her feet in surrender.

  The girl took aim. The children pressed their mouths to the ground, long hair blanketing their backs, and whispered into the cracked dirt.

  Come back, dear one.

  Come back to sun.

  Night is over, dreaming done.

  “Get out,” the soldier girl said. “Or I’ll blow your heads off.”

  Come back, come back.

  All is well.

  Your secrets are safe; no one will tell.

  “That’s right.” The girl spat. “Can’t talk without a head.”

  Gina wanted to laugh. This girl was such a little badass.

  Suddenly, Gina felt cold. She blinked, for one moment back in her body, back in the tub, the whole thing just a trippy weed and exhaustion-induced dream. “Go away!” she said to no one in particular. As the words bubbled from her lips, a hand pulled her hair from behind, yanking her back down to the depths.

  The strange children.

  The broken foster-child blondes.

  The soldier girl took aim at the cracked earth and shot, round after round until the ground began to shake, a seismic rhythm in time with Gina’s shaking as her body fought the dream.

  Stay, the green child cooed to a middle-school version of Gina in her sixth foster home. Blood dripped from the dirty bandages around the young Gina’s wrists onto her dirty bare feet.

  Tell, the brown child whispered to an entire classroom of kindergarten Ginas, one girl for every day that year’s foster father drove her to school the long way. They sat at the brown boy’s feet, scraped knees bare in too-short dresses. “We’ll get in trouble if we tell,” they said, small voices overlapping. “Is it snack time yet? We’re hungry.”

  Where was the soldier girl? Gina imagined a whole squad of them, platoons of teenage Ginas marching alongside monster tanks. She felt them massing at her borders, her body now shaking with the beat of their boots.

  The bathwater was cool again, light against her skin. She sat up, blinking.

  Stumbling out of the bathroom, she dropped naked onto the clean sheets of her soft bed. She was wiped out, so sleepy she could hardly lift her head at the sound coming from somewhere in the room, near the window. Glancing up, expecting to see the cat, she saw a silhouette against the blinds of a tangle-haired child, reminding her of Xochi at five with hair past her butt, so snarled it took a full hour to comb.

  That weed must have been laced, she thought, and fell into a state much deeper than sleep.

  45

  When a Sinner Kissed an Angel

  Io sat up in bed, shivering in the still-dark morning. After the last year’s fast from meat, wine and sex, she found herself embracing a state that was not quite solitude, but rather, singularity. Her time with James had reinforced the feeling of being both more connected to all living things and progressively less attached to anything specific. She no longer needed the reassurance of touch to understand the feeling she had for her family. She mourned the loss as she embraced the open place it made in her soul.

  Given Leviticus’s need to bond through sex and tendency to romanticize his lovers, she’d been afraid of what would happen when she ended their physical relationship, but they’d become closer than ever. Finally, last night, there was a change. He was struggling, she was sure of that, but reaching toward something now, away from the past he’d been so afraid to release. When he hugged her good night, his thoughts were elsewhere, not following her up the stairs like a loyal dog. And she was glad of it. Happy for him, happy for herself. She was so light, walking up the final flight—freedom increased, fear defeated.

  Why, then, was she awake before dawn, bewildered again by this anxious unrest? What impulse led her away from her own wing of the mansion, through the basement and up the spiral staircase?

  Her bare feet slid over the wood floor of the sunporch leading to Leviticus’s bedroom. The sky was cloudy, pink at the edges with the first hint of dawn. She touched the heavy wooden door with the tip of her index finger. It swung open without its habitual squeak.

  Her intake of breath cleared the sky, illuminating Leviticus’s bed. He was not alone. Xochi was there, lying beside him. Both were asleep.

  A trick of the sunrise cast a halo over their dark heads. A pair of orthodox icons, so beautiful Io couldn’t take her eyes away until the ocean winds blew fog at the sun.

  Was this the portent of the last months’ insomnia? Or was something else coming, something she expected even less than the perfect harmony she’d just witnessed between her daughter’s caretaker and the father of her child?

  Io stepped backward out of the room and hurried down the stairs.

  Jealousy. She’d been foolish to think herself immune. Returning to her room, she searched through the bottom drawers of her bureau for running clothes, long disused. Throwing them on, she hurried downstairs in her socks and dug through the coat closet till she found her running shoes. Grabbing the first hoodie she touched in the front hall—Pad’s, by the smell—she zipped it over her slender body, grown even thinner this year. Closing the front door as quietly as she could, Io raced up the hill toward Cole Valley.

  46

  Angel of the Morning

  The sky paled from rose to blush. Pallas wondered if the green girl and her brother had found Xochi. Beneath the siblings’ clear love and concern, Pallas had sensed a river of fear, cold and full of sharks. Now, after hours of waiting, her whole body was composed of worry. Like nesting dolls, you could open any part of her and find another worried little Pallas inside, and another inside that.

  She opened her closet, fingering her many dresses, ironed to perfection, hanging by sleeve length and color. She pass
ed them by and pulled down her jeans from the top shelf. Before Xochi had come, Pallas had never worn them. Xochi had insisted. “Play clothes,” she’d said, picking out a pair of dark, straight-legged Levis and some black high-tops. “Like the Sound of Music kids meets the Ramones.”

  Pallas pulled the jeans over her hips. They were stiff, but Xochi said they’d soften with wear. She laced on the shoes. She couldn’t stay in the attic alone, not one second longer. It was a cold morning. She pulled on a sweater of Xochi’s and found her cat hat in its usual spot.

  The only person in the house who might be awake was Io. Pallas shivered down the servants’ stairs, her sneakers silent on the treads. Her mother’s door was open, her room empty, the bed uncharacteristically unmade. All Pallas wanted was to lie down in the patch of sunlight that fell over Io’s pillows, pull the Io-scented covers over her head and sleep the entire day, but her worry was too big to let Pallas rest.

  She debated where to go next. Pad had been the first one home, long before anyone else. She knew because his motorcycle was the loudest, with its distinctive lionlike roar, but he might not be alone. Ky had gone to the party with Xochi, too, so he was the next logical choice, but the most inviolable rule of Pallas’s childhood was to never, ever wake Kylen before noon.

  One the other hand, it was Saturday, Pallas and Leviticus’s day together. Pallas’s dad was an incredibly hard sleeper, but he didn’t have a specific rule about waking him. In fact, when Pallas was younger, waking Leviticus had been her special job. Back then, he was always sleeping, missing band practice and running late for meetings and gigs. Sending Pallas in had been the final and most deadly weapon of whoever needed to wake him. Using the sunporch as her runway, she’d barrel into his room and leap onto his bed. Any technique was fair game. She’d bounce and bop him with pillows, tickle him, sing show tunes. If that didn’t work, she’d use her feet and strong legs to push him bodily out of bed.