All of Us with Wings

by Michelle Ruiz Keil

  “Do I know you?” He looked Xochi up and down.

  “I’m new,” Xochi said, opening her eyes Bambi wide.

  “Where’s your stuff?”

  Stuff? Crap. “Inside,” Xochi said, conjuring her best black-and-white movie ingénue. “I went out for coffee.”

  “Where’s your coffee?”

  “I forgot my wallet.” Xochi batted her lashes.

  The bouncer shook his head but let her pass.

  In the lobby, a woman with a huge duffel stomped toward a staircase. Xochi followed.

  In the dressing room, her cover was instantly blown.

  “Who are you?” Eight sets of mascaraed lashes blinked at Xochi.

  “I’m looking for someone,” Xochi began.

  “You can’t be in here. Employees only.” The tall blonde was clearly the alpha. She stood, wearing her G-string and lacy triangle bra the way most people wore a full set of clothes.

  “I’m looking for Gina,” Xochi said. “I need to find her.”

  “Get lost.” In her street clothes, the woman with the duffel had looked tough. Nearly naked, she looked tougher, muscled like an athlete. Xochi held her ground.

  An older dancer put down her lipstick. “What do you want with Gina, honey?”

  “She’s my mom.” Saying it out loud was a surprising relief.

  “Wow.” The dancer met Xochi’s eyes in the mirror. Her breasts were enormous, fake and a little lumpy. She looked like an actress Xochi’d seen a million times but couldn’t place. “We can’t tell you anything, sweetie. I’m sorry.”

  “I know there’s probably some sort of rule. Like, confidentiality—”

  “It’s not that.” A dancer at the end of the makeup counter turned to Xochi. She looked too young to be working at a strip club. “Misty keeps to herself.”

  Misty? That must be Gina’s stage name. Xochi rolled her eyes.

  “What?” The girl smiled. She was gorgeous. Latina, but maybe not Mexican, with dark brown skin and gray-blue eyes. Xochi realized she’d seen her before, onstage. And after that at the warehouse party.

  “Misty was a horse,” Xochi said. “Not the one from the kids’ book, but, like, a real horse my mom used to take care of. Kind of funny for a stripper name.”

  “I named myself after my cat,” the tough dancer said, half transformed by a long coppery wig. “And Sasha’s right.” She gestured to the dancer in the corner. “Gina doesn’t hang with anybody here.”

  The women turned back to their grooming. The older dancer glanced at the clock. “Come on,” she said, pulling a robe over her lingerie. She steered Xochi out of the dressing room, back to the lobby. “How’d you get up here?”

  “Said I was a new girl.”

  “Perfect.” The dancer approached the front counter. “Can you call this poor girl a taxi? Make sure it’s Ben. She’s not feeling well, and I don’t want some asshole taking advantage.”

  “Will do,” the man said.

  “Wait out front.” The woman nodded toward the door. “Ben takes all of us home at night. If anyone knows where your mom lives, it’s him. You have money for the fare?” Xochi shook her head, suddenly wishing this woman was her long-lost mom instead of Gina. The dancer pressed a ten-dollar bill into Xochi’s hand. “If it’s more than that, tell him Cassie will make up the difference tonight.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Cassie smiled. “Get out of here. Go see your mom.”

  Outside, the line had grown. One of the waiting customers was smoking a clove. What the hell? Xochi thought. “Have a spare?” she asked, using the same voice she’d used on the bouncer. The man blinked, surprised to be addressed. He pulled out his pack and handed it to her. “Take it,” he said.

  A yellow cab pulled up, right on cue.

  “Thanks,” Xochi said. “See you around.”

  53

  Break Down the Door

  Peasblossom woke with a splitting headache and an altered memory. One moment, he’d been in Gina’s window, meowing a warning, the next he was laid out on a hardwood floor, waking after an hours-long, drugged-feeling sleep. The creatures had clearly outsmarted him.

  Now he found himself beside the prone body of Xochi’s mother. The woman was so still, he couldn’t help but think of Ron—one moment sleeping, the next gone. Peasblossom gathered himself, remembering Nora’s bravery as she held Ron in the last moments of his life.

  Climbing onto the woman’s chest, Peasblossom concentrated. There was a heartbeat. Slow, but present. He purred as hard as he could, pouring healing warmth into Gina’s body. When she was breathing more regularly, Peasblossom left her bed to pace, bits of folklore coalescing into an absurd diagnosis: Xochi’s mother was in some version of an enchanted slumber.

  Glad there were no witnesses, he tried the most obvious remedy, touching his gray muzzle to her pale pink lips. For the sake of thoroughness, he applied his tongue, tasting traces of marijuana and the salt humans so strangely excreted. He yowled in her ear. He nudged her with a paw. He tickled her feet with his whiskers. Desperate, he climbed to the dresser and, in a flying leap—well executed but ill advised, given his age—landed on her chest with all the impact of his fourteen pounds. As a last resort, he bit her hand. It twitched reflexively, but there were no other signs of consciousness.

  Her faint pulse troubled him. He touched his nose to her cheek. It was cold again. He climbed back to roost on her chest, purring and kneading with velvet paws.

  The screech of the buzzer made his fur stand on end. Could it be the creatures? But that was absurd. If they wanted to return, they certainly wouldn’t come in through the lobby. The buzzer rang again, tentatively this time. Peasblossom walked to the front door of the apartment, finding a conveniently placed chair where a human might sit to put on her shoes. In this case, it allowed the cat to stand braced against its high back and work the lever that operated the intercom.

  “Hello?” The young female voice cracked on the upper syllable of the query. Peasblossom pushed the lever in the opposite direction, meowing into the speaker.

  “Um, hello? Is Gina there?”

  Xochi! Peasblossom pressed the button below the intercom’s lever that opened the lobby door. He eyed the deadbolt, so high there was no hope of reaching it. Perhaps if the chair was closer. He put his weight against its legs to no avail. He rested and tried again.

  The girl’s quiet knock on the apartment door mocked the cat’s lack of human anatomy. Not that he’d ever trade his sleek geometry for the gangling lope of a hairless human, but living in a world designed for their use was often maddening.

  “Hello?”

  He smelled Xochi’s fear through the crack in the door. It was an old building. Pushing his snout into the space, Peasblossom had an idea. The gap was wide, the wood floor slippery with a hundred years of varnish. Where were Gina’s keys? Most likely in her purse. The one-room space was neat and spare and seemed to contain neither object.

  Xochi knocked again. “Uh, is someone in there? Who buzzed me in?”

  Peasblossom meowed. Perhaps the knowledge that some living creature was on the other side of the door would keep her there.

  He realized that the smaller door in the entryway must lead to a closet. A doorknob was something he could usually operate, especially the faceted glass knobs found in so many San Francisco apartments. A concerted push from an upright position was all it took.

  There was the inevitable bag, an unstructured affair, thankfully without a zipper. On a plain ring were two keys. Peasblossom grasped the ring in his mouth and raced to the entry. Dropping the key ring and meowing once more, he pushed it under the door.

  54

  Gold Dust Woman

  “Peasblossom?” The Siamese cat was the last thing Xochi expected to see in her mother’s doorway. “Peas?” She crouched and held out her hand. The cat presse
d his head into her damp palm and rubbed against her leg. Xochi stepped into a cramped foyer and Gina’s familiar scent hit her like a Muni bus. Luckily she hadn’t eaten, or the contents of her stomach would be on the floor. She stood frozen as Peasblossom slipped behind her to push the front door shut.

  A gentle bite on her ankle reminded her to move her feet. It took two steps to get from the entry to the main room of the apartment. A double bed was tucked into the curve of the picture window. The morning sun made little headway through the blinds. Gina needed absolute dark to sleep. In every new apartment, the first thing she bought was a set of blackout shades. There were times they couldn’t afford a two-bedroom, back when Xochi was afraid of the dark. In those apartments, she slept on the couch with the TV on mute, the flickering light providing comfort in so many ways her mother could not.

  Walking to the edge of the bed took ten steps.

  Gina had always been a light sleeper, but now she was motionless, her body surrendered in a way that looked wrong. Xochi turned on the overhead light. She pulled up the shades. Gina’s face registered nothing. Xochi clapped beside her ear. The cat meowed and shook his head back and forth, deliberately making the gesture for “no.”

  “Are you saying you tried already? Making noise?”

  The cat mewed affirmation.

  In the light, Xochi saw fine lines around Gina’s mouth and dark circles under her eyes. Her hands rested on the patchwork quilt—a blanket Xochi recognized as Loretta’s work, a present for Gina’s twenty-eighth birthday. She must have taken it with her when she left Badger Creek. Gina had taken the blanket, but left her daughter, abandoned in the middle of nowhere with an angry, abusive man.

  Xochi backed away from her mother’s bed and went into the kitchen. She splashed her face with cold water. She remembered the box of cigarettes. She didn’t have a lighter, so she used the stove. The cat followed her, wrinkling his nose. Xochi opened a window.

  The kitchen was minuscule. So different from the one at Eris Gardens with its long wooden table, painted yellow after Frida Kahlo’s, Io’s favorite artist.

  Io and Leviticus. Their names paired so easily. Maybe they weren’t together, but they would always be Pallas’s parents, always a sort of pair. Xochi inhaled, the clove tobacco crackling in the quiet apartment.

  Pallas. This whole thing had started the night of the Equinox when she’d come home and found Pallas smoking. Xochi wanted nothing more than to rewind the past few weeks and reclaim her innocent nights alone in her narrow governess’s bed, listening to Pallas’s light snoring in the room next door.

  She stubbed the cigarette out in the sink and threw the butt in the trash. She made sure to rinse any traces of ash from the snowy porcelain. Looking around, she could see the entire apartment was spotless. Gina was still a total neat freak.

  Peasblossom leaped onto a kitchen chair with a questioning meow. At least Xochi wasn’t alone. The cat was here—she wouldn’t try to figure out why or how—and the Waterbabies were depending on her.

  “So, Peasblossom,” she said, “riddle me this. How many stupid girls and Siamese cats does it take to wake a deadbeat mother from an enchanted slumber?”

  55

  Sitting in Limbo

  Leviticus had always dreaded the oh-shit moment of fear that came with mornings—missed appointments, unkept promises, regrets from the night before. Unchecked, he could sleep away an entire day, the one beautiful oblivion he was still allowed.

  This morning was different. Awareness spread like syrup over a stack of pancakes, a lazy, welcome sweetness. He glanced down at the tented sheet. A dream scene: swimming with Xochi in a calm river, naked and intertwined.

  He sat up. Her side of the bed was empty. He understood the animal need for retreat. He imagined her slipping out of bed, hungover and raw. She would be in her room in the attic, curled in her narrow bed with her piles of clothes and half-read books like a fox in a den.

  He glanced at the clock. Almost ten. Shit. He’d lost track again, might have forgotten today was Saturday. Good thing Xochi was gone. He clenched at the thought of Pallas trekking up here to get him and finding who knew what instead. It would have been so easy to reach out for Xochi in sleep, to touch her before he remembered he shouldn’t.

  Sleeping next to her had been so natural. Chemical, alchemical. That’s how it seemed with her. And here he was, romanticizing again. As always, Kylen appeared, a goth Jiminy Cricket in his head: Was last night at Duncan’s romantic, asshole? Leviticus reviewed: Xochi nodded out, top undone, debauched. It took him years to realize that many people, most people, wanted nothing to do with the kind of escape he used to believe he needed.

  Most people, but not Xochi.

  He sat up and took a long breath, as close as he ever got to meditation. The movement released Xochi’s scent from his chaste blankets. In all the time he’d lived in this room, no one but her had ever shared his bed. He cringed, thinking of the stupid note he’d left with the guitar—was it only yesterday? The days were melting into each other, a warning sign he’d come to recognize.

  He hadn’t looked at his calendar since before LA. His notebook of reminders and to-do lists had devolved into a lovelorn diary—the infamous pro-con list, bits of bad poetry, drafts of letters he wished he could write. He would die if Kylen ever got ahold of it. He should burn the damned thing. His hand went to his chest, pressing a sudden ache. I’m lonely, he realized.

  He sat up all the way, feet on the floor. First things first. He was here, alive, with his imperfect vessel and flawed heart, an unsolvable problem—but all things considered, he was all right. He sifted through his dreams for the song of the day, something to soothe the familiar panic. The river. The water. Loneliness. Limbo. There it was: Jimmy Cliff. He stood and pulled on his pants, singing along to the chorus.

  56

  She’s Lost Control

  Io paid the driver. Halfway home from her morning run, she realized she was shaky with hunger. She balanced the large pink donut box as she opened the door, stomach rumbling. It had been years since she’d eaten one. They couldn’t possibly be vegan, but she didn’t ask the baker. Better not to know.

  In the kitchen, Leviticus sat with a cup of coffee and the paper, still so like the boy she’d met all those years ago, thoughtful and handsome and unlucky in love. She wouldn’t mention what she’d seen this morning. No need to embarrass him. Or herself.

  Io glanced at her watch. It was ten-thirty, half an hour past the time Leviticus and Pallas always had their Saturday breakfast. “Why are you here, love?”

  “Pallas never showed. I thought she was with you. She must be with Xochi.” His eyes narrowed at the mention of Xochi’s name. Io still struggled when it came to reading faces, but her time with Leviticus hiding under the covers from impending adulthood had been an excellent education. She’d learned so much from his sweet transparent face.

  Kylen’s motorcycle roared into its parking spot. He banged into the kitchen looking tired. Was he just back from the previous night?

  “What are you doing here?” he said to Leviticus.

  “Pal stood me up,” Leviticus said. “She must be out with Xochi.”

  Kylen paled. Io stood, she wasn’t sure why.

  “What?” Leviticus asked them.

  “She’s not with Xochi,” Kylen said. “The governess and I just had breakfast, followed by a raging fight. She bailed. No way she came back here.”

  Blood rushed to Io’s neck and face. Her ears burned. She sat down, trapping her hands under her legs so she couldn’t use them to hide. “I saw you,” she said to Leviticus. “This morning. You and Xochi.”

  There. It was out.

  “Join the club,” Kylen said. “I needed to talk to her about last night and she wasn’t in her room. Wasn’t too hard to find her.”

  “It was news to me,” Io said. “I don’t know why I went into your
room. I’m sorry I intruded.”

  Leviticus closed his eyes, his face pained. Io’s brain, usually so busy, was still. Leviticus rose, went to the junk drawer, and retrieved a pack of cigarettes. No one stopped him from lighting it on the stove. He took a drag, squared his shoulders, and looked Io in the eye. “Pallas must have seen us, too.”

  The small word us rested in Io’s left ear, a word that didn’t include her. She remembered the brass bead she’d carried there for a week as a child, careful never to let it become lodged in her ear canal. She was six years old and deep in a phase of experiments and secrets. Like right now, she thought.

  The donut she’d eaten in the taxi surged up. She made it to the sink just in time. Her senses were out of order. The vomit tasted violet, the light smelled of vomit, the water on her hands felt like oil.

  Leviticus was behind her. He turned off the sink, dried her hands with a towel. He gave her a glass of water. She drank, hands shaking, but at least the water tasted like water and the light lost its acrid scent.

  “Come here,” Kylen said, opening his arms to both of them. He rested his chin on Io’s head and hummed a soft tune to ground her. Leviticus pulled both of them closer. Io looked up to see his head resting on Kylen’s shoulder, his eyes closed.

  “I’m okay,” Io said, stepping away.

  “I know.” Kylen smiled. “Dudes, this is normal. Growing pains and shit. Don’t freak out.”

  “I’ll take the far side of the park and Land’s End,” Leviticus said. “I know her spots.”

  “I’ll do the neighborhood.” Kylen downed his coffee and zipped his jacket.

  “I’ll wake the others and organize them.” Io was surprised at her own calm, but she was a mother, after all. She’d endured pregnancy, given birth, raised a strong, healthy child. Pallas was sensible. She was safe. Everything was going to be okay.