Clover Blue

by Eldonna Edwards

  I drop the syringe and kick it under the seat. “Nothing. I just bumped my head on the ceiling.”

  Gaia laughs. “Yeah, not a lot of room in these things. But I love this ride. Traded half a pound of weed for it from some freak in Humboldt County.” She glances at Harmony. “Don’t worry, that was a long time ago. I’m not a pothead anymore.”

  I suck a drop of blood from my finger and stare out the window at the apple orchards and pastures. As we get closer to Sebastopol, the farms get smaller and the houses get closer together. On the east end of town where Bodega turns into Highway 12, we cross Main Street and from there it’s just ten minutes before we pull into the social services lot.

  When Harmony bends her seat forward to let me out, the syringe comes into view. I quickly extract myself and slam the seat back into position.

  She catches me frowning. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I think the exhaust fumes just made me a little sick to my stomach or something.”

  Harmony steals sideways glances at me as the three of us walk into a room filled with metal chairs lined up against one wall, most of them filled with mothers and kids. Cheerful posters decorate ugly beige walls covered with scuffs and patches. A couple of toddlers sit on the floor next to a box of books and junky-looking toys. The women all look tired.

  Harmony and I stay near the door while Gaia checks in at the window.

  I tap Harmony on the arm. “Are you nervous?”

  “Stop it. I’m only nervous if you keep asking if I’m ner-vous.”

  We wait in uncomfortable steel chairs for our turn. Gaia’s foot is kicking a mile a minute. In her polished black flats and stiff, boring clothes, it’s like somebody switched out a real flower with a fake plastic one.

  A heavyset woman with short hair appears, clutching a green folder. “Ruth Porter?”

  Gaia jumps to her feet and motions for Harmony to follow her. Harmony glances back at me from the doorway. I throw her the peace sign and smile before they disappear down a fluorescent-lit hallway.

  They’re gone for what feels like hours. I spend most of the time meditating. I can feel people staring and hear them whispering, but I don’t care.

  When they finally return, Gaia’s voice is crabby. “Let’s go,” she says. One look at Harmony’s face, and it’s obvious the meeting didn’t go well.

  As soon as we’re outside Gaia starts yelling, “Fucking bureaucratic bullshit!”

  I lean toward Harmony. “What happened in there?”

  She looks like she’s about to cry. “They need to do an inspection. To verify where I live. Where she and I both supposedly live.”

  My stomach sinks. Goji’s not going to like this. None of them will.

  Gaia throws her arms up in the air, still cussing up a storm. “Fuck them! That’s it, I’m done!” She tears up the stack of papers in her hands and tosses them in a nearby trash can along with her hat and scarf. When we reach the parking lot she yanks open the car door. “Come on. Let’s go get some lunch.”

  Gaia stops at a hole-in-the-wall bar for sandwiches. The room is dark and hazy and filled with smoke. The only people besides us are a waitress and a couple of men at the bar, smoking cigarettes. We sit at one of three wooden tables covered with overlapping water stains. The waitress laughs at me when I ask if they have any veggie burgers.

  “This ain’t no hippie kitchen. I can bring you a salad, blue eyes.” She looks at Harmony and raises her painted eyebrows.

  Harmony closes her menu. “I’ll have a salad, too.”

  The waitress wipes a glob of something brownish off the table with a napkin while she waits for Gaia to order.

  Gaia fans herself with the menu. “Bring me a bacon burger. Extra mayo.”

  Harmony and I both drop our jaws. Gaia looks at us and laughs. “What? I need protein. That bitchy caseworker drained all my energy.”

  When the food arrives, Gaia is no longer at our table. She left to put change in the juke box and started talking with one of the guys at the bar. They both disappeared down a hallway toward the bathroom.

  Harmony keeps looking toward the red EXIT sign over the hallway entrance. “What’s taking her so long?”

  I shrug. “Maybe she had to take a crap.”

  Harmony punches my arm. “Gross.”

  We eat our salads, which are just brown-edged iceberg lettuce and flavorless tomato slices. I bury my plate in croutons to soak up the giant lake of ranch dressing.

  Harmony picks at her salad with a fork. “What do you think is going to happen?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Goji will have an idea.”

  “I’m worried, Blue.”

  I set down my fork and grab her hand. “Don’t worry. They’ll take care of you.”

  She glances up from her plate.

  “I’ll take care of you.”

  By the time Gaia stumbles back to the table, her burger is cold. Her hair has fallen out of the bobby pins and her blouse is untucked. She takes one bite of her sandwich and tosses it back on the plate.

  Harmony stares at her mother’s feet. “Where are your shoes?”

  Gaia wiggles her toes and laughs. “Fuck fucking shoes. Let’s get out of here.”

  I glance toward the bar. “What about the bill?”

  The man at the end of the bar waves at us and winks at Gaia.

  “I already took care of it. C’mon.”

  Gaia hands me the keys when we get to her VW. “You drive.”

  “I don’t even have a permit yet.”

  “I’m giving you permission. That’s your permit.” She pushes the seat forward and climbs in the back. “I’m gonna take a nap.”

  Harmony frowns. “Blue and I are almost the same age. I thought you were a feminist. You don’t trust me to drive?”

  Gaia curls up and rolls so her back is to us. “I don’t give a shit, you two figure it out. Leave me alone.”

  I hold the keys toward Harmony. “Here you go.” We both know she’s a better driver. Sirona took over our driving lessons after Coyote left and she sometimes lets Harmony drive her all the way to the Freestone Store.

  Harmony climbs into the passenger seat. “I don’t want to drive. I just want her to know that I’m capable.” She glances toward the backseat and growls a little under her breath. “Unlike her.” She looks back at me. “Can you get us back to SFC?”

  “I think so.” I turn the key and crank the engine. “Pretty sure.”

  * * *

  It’s a straight shot on Highway 12 to the turnoff toward SFC. I grip the steering wheel with both hands. I’m terrified of getting pulled over or doing something stupid and getting us hurt.

  Harmony pats my leg. “Relax, Blue. You’re doing great.”

  Trucks, cars, and eventually even a school bus passes the bug and pulls in front of us. The kids in the backseat stick out their tongues and stretch their faces, pointing. Harmony makes a piggy face back. One of them cranks a fist up and down, the signal for a semi truck to honk. Harmony reaches in front of me and makes a short beep-beep with the horn. They all start laughing.

  Unfortunately, the horn wakes up Gaia. I glance at Gaia in the rearview mirror. She sits up in the backseat, staring out the window like a lost kid. Her eyes are so dilated there’s almost nothing but pupil. She mumbles, sounding completely out of it. “Sacred Space, my ass. He doesn’t fuck anybody.”

  Harmony wheels around to face Gaia. “You’re not making any sense. Go back to sleep.”

  “He calls it sexual transmal . . . transmittal . . . transmutation or some shit. Supposed to make you more enlightened or something if you don’t come.” She exaggerates Goji’s soft voice: “Hold that energy and funnel it inward.” Gaia flutters her fingers in the air in front of her and makes a ghost sound. “Wooooo . . . can you feel my energy?” She laughs but it’s more like a cackle than her usual full-throated laughter. “Orgasms are a good thing. I prefer to let the love out, not hold it in.”

  Harmony turns back toward the front
window. “We don’t want to hear about your sex life. Really inappropriate, Ruth.”

  “Hah! Get real. I see the way you look at each other, flirting. And the way Goji looks at your blond sister? I bet he fucks that one.”

  My face goes hot. I stare straight ahead. But if what she says is true, maybe Goji hasn’t actually had sex with Rain.

  Gaia’s words are slurred but deliberate. “He blew it. He had a way to make things right and he fucking blew it.”

  Harmony spins around on her knees and peers over the seat at her mom. “What are you talking about?”

  “She’s my ace in the hole to get you back, kiddo.”

  “Who is? I don’t want to go back, not with you. I’m right where I belong.”

  Gaia starts to cry. “No, you’re not. Blue neither. Or Rain, for that matter. A kid should be with their family. It’s fucked up, man. Totally fucked up. I tried to convince them, but nobody would listen.”

  Gaia mumbles something else before passing back out. All that’s visible in the mirror is her slack mouth, tilted down on one side.

  Harmony turns back around in her seat. “Do you think she tried to convince them to take you back home?”

  “She’s messed up on something. I wouldn’t take anything she says too seriously.”

  “But maybe she found out about you. I remember her loudly arguing with Goji one night about you. It was shortly before she took off that last time.”

  I glance in the rearview mirror but all I can see is the long row of cars behind us. “Doesn’t matter now. Let’s just get her home.”

  We drive the rest of the way in silence. It takes almost twice as long on the way back as it did to get to Santa Rosa. I keep thinking about the letters in Goji’s shack. Maybe he was afraid that Gaia would tell Harmony about how I ended up here.

  As we approach the Fullers’ house Harmony points toward the driveway. “Hey, that’s Lotus’s car.”

  I slow down even more than I was already going. “She’s probably picking up some more of her things.”

  Lotus stands near the back of her car. She slams the trunk closed while balancing a cardboard box in her other arm and carries it toward the farmhouse.

  Harmony sticks her hand out the window and yells, “Hey, Lotus!”

  Lotus walks through the open doorway and disappears.

  “Looks like she’s bringing stuff to the house, not the other way around.”

  “Your room isn’t very big. Maybe she’s trading it for other stuff she needs.”

  We turn down our long drive and through the gate, past the hand-lettered Saffron Freedom Community sign. I park the bug under a willow tree near the garden. Harmony and I both jump out, leaving the doors open so Gaia has fresh air. I pull my T-shirt over my head and tuck it into my back pocket. Harmony strips down to the cotton slip she had on under her dress.

  Jade runs up to greet us. She looks from the car to me. “You drove? Where’s Gaia?”

  I nod toward the backseat, where Gaia is curled in a fetal position, snoring. Jade reaches in and tugs on Gaia’s bare foot. “Hey, sister. How’d it go?”

  Gaia doesn’t respond.

  “I think it wore her out,” I say. “Maybe we should let her sleep.”

  Jade looks suspicious of Gaia’s condition.

  “Where is everybody?” I say, changing the subject.

  “They drove into town to hear Wave sing at that pizza place, to take their minds off . . .” She looks at the car. “Off everything. I stayed here with Aura because she’s not feeling well. They should all be back soon.”

  Harmony kicks off her shoes. “We saw Lotus on our way in. She was at her house.”

  Jade glances nervously toward the road. “Yeah, I think she was going to drop off some of her things before joining the rest of them.”

  I suddenly feel exhausted. “I think I’ll go for a walk. My legs are cramped from sitting all day.”

  Harmony turns to me. “I’m going with you.”

  Jade calls after us. “Wait, so you don’t know anything more?”

  Harmony keeps walking, leaving me to answer. I turn and shrug. “We’ll be home before sunset, okay?”

  Jade glances back at Gaia curled in the backseat of the bug. “Okay.” The look on Jade’s face says anything but okay.

  * * *

  As soon as we reach the path beyond the edge of SFC Harmony stops and grabs my arms. “What are we going to do? We can’t have county services sticking their noses into the community. We don’t have electricity or plumbing and none of us are in school.”

  “I know. I’ll think of something.”

  She let’s go of me and hangs her head. “I wanted to believe she’d really changed. All that stuff about starting over in Portland with a real job and not smoking so much weed.”

  “You need to think about yourself right now. Gaia is an adult.”

  Harmony crosses her arms in front of her chest. “What if she screws everything up? If they try to put me in a foster home I’ll run away.”

  “Nobody’s going to put you in a foster home.”

  “How do you know that, Blue?”

  I look into the eyes of the girl I’ve known since we were five, running around like a couple of wild cubs. “Because I won’t let them.”

  She smiles. “Blue?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you going to kiss me again?”

  “Do you want me to?”

  She nods.

  I lean in to kiss her but stop myself.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know. It’s weird. I’ve always thought of you as my sister.”

  “Always?”

  “Always before lately.”

  “I’m not your sister, Blue. I’m your best friend.”

  She tilts her head so her mouth is just inches from mine. I can’t help myself. I kiss her, longer and more intensely than I’d meant to. When I pull back her eyes open and I feel like I could swim away in them.

  “Still feel weird?”

  I smile. “No. Yes.” I brush the hair away from her face. “A little. But it feels right.”

  We walk farther, hand in hand, until we reach one of our favorite live oak trees. It’s huge, almost as big as the one we built our tree house in, with low limbs and a wide spray of branches that nearly sweep the ground. I sit and lean against the trunk. The grass is warm beneath me. Harmony scooches between my legs with her back against me. I wrap my arms around her arms and kiss her lightly on the back of her neck. A tingle runs through my entire body.

  I want to tell her I’ll protect her, but I don’t want to ruin this moment with a promise I might not be able to keep. “It’s going to be okay,” I say, as much to myself as to her.

  She softens in my arms. We watch as the sun lowers itself under the tree line on the far side of Salmon Creek. In the distance the cowbell rings for dinner and we ignore it.

  30

  Gaia slept all night in the back of the bug. She’s still there when I come down the tree to pee just before sunrise. She looks pale and it scares me. Her head is in a weird position, halfway off the seat. I touch her toe. I’m relieved when she moves her foot. She makes a whimpering noise, but she doesn’t wake.

  “Gaia? You okay?”

  She rolls to face the back of the seat and pulls her knees to her chest. “Go away.”

  * * *

  It’s not until we’re halfway through sun salutations that Gaia finally shows up. She stretches a mat out in front of me next to Doobie and steps into tree pose. She immediately loses her balance and nearly falls backward on top of me.

  “Sorry,” she whispers.

  Goji throws her a stern look for speaking out loud.

  Harmony is unusually quiet through our morning meal. Jade cooked grits with eggs and hash browns, one of Harmony’s favorites, but she hardly touches a bite. The others make small talk about anything and everything except Gaia and Harmony’s appointment. We haven’t told anyone about the county inspection. And it
doesn’t look like Gaia is going to fill them in.

  When Goji finally speaks, I hold my breath. I expect he’ll have something to say about my driving home yesterday. I’m relieved when he addresses Gaia instead.

  “Obviously yesterday must have been a difficult day. Perhaps it might be easier to discuss privately.”

  Gaia looks up from her plate. Her skin has a grayish cast and she looks older than her thirty-two years. “It was awful.” When she starts to cry, Doobie tries to comfort her.

  Goji stands and walks behind Gaia. “Let’s go for a walk, sister.”

  She takes his outstretched hand and they amble off together toward the shack.

  * * *

  An hour later Goji calls us all back to the table with the cowbell. As soon as we’re seated he reaches for Rain’s hand to his left and Doobie’s to his right. We all reach for each other’s hands and wait.

  “Our sister has some news she would like to share.”

  Gaia raises her head. Her normally cheery face has been replaced with bloodshot eyes. “I have to leave. Those food stamps and the checks I was forwarding were illegal because I was living out of state. I could be charged with fraud. Social services wants to come to SFC and do an inspection. They need us to prove that Harmony and I live here.”

  Willow opens her mouth to speak but Goji shakes his head. “Let her finish.”

  Gaia takes a shaky breath. “You’ll all be at risk, especially the kids. I can’t let that happen.” Her eyes fill with tears. She looks at Harmony. “If they find you here, they’ll take you.” Her eyes flick in my direction. “And the more they go looking, the more they might uncover.”

  “Like what? We’re not hurting anyone,” Rain says.

  Goji glances at Rain, then looks away quickly. “They’ll force us to get permits, or, more likely, shut us down. The Czech might sustain fines. They could claim neglect and take the minors into custody.”

  Sirona makes a pfffft sound. “Neglect? These are the best-educated, most well-fed children within miles.”

  Goji nods. “I know, sister. But that’s not how they’ll see it. By law, the children have to be enrolled in school. All of our structures would come down, including the tree house. Everything would be condemned.” He smiles at Lotus. “We’ve been very lucky that our neighbors support us and the locals tolerate us. If the government gets involved, it’s over. But Gaia isn’t making this decision alone. If you all want to take that risk, we’ll ask her to stay.”