by Dahlia Adler
I walked over to a nearby hedgehog cactus and tapped its spine with the tip of my finger.
“And what exactly did we do?” I asked.
Mateo glared at me and then got up and left without answering.
III: ICE STORM
Two days later, Lucy and Laurel came up to the greenhouse. They brought me hot cocoa from McDonald’s, which I hadn’t asked for and didn’t really want. I waited for them to leave, but they didn’t. Laurel leaned her hip against a shelf and started tugging lightly at a bright-green bud of barely formed squash on the vine. Its smallness made her fingers look too long, spindly like sticks.
“Mateo looks bad,” she said.
“He’s not sleeping,” I replied.
“He’s scared,” Lucy offered. “Daniel keeps asking about the night of the wreck, like he thinks Mateo is holding back some important detail. Yesterday, after last period, Daniel full-on shoved Mateo into the lockers, and Coach Jones had to come and break it up.”
I sifted my hand through soil, poured fresh into a pot from a just-opened bag. New dirt smelled like air but also sour like decay. It was cat-fur soft and very, very dark in color, like molten chocolate cake. Sometimes, when I was alone, I would pinch some off and hold it to the tip of my tongue.
What Lucy and Laurel were telling me—this wasn’t really news. Over the course of just the last two days Mateo was clearly getting worse, wilting and going brittle, barely hanging on. If he were a plant, I could repot him in this new, chocolate-cake soil and water him, and maybe he’d take root and get a second life, but, unfortunately, Mateo was a boy, not a plant.
“Mateo gave us a ride to school this morning in his new car,” Laurel said, still fiddling with the squash with her clacking stick fingers. “And he ran over a jackrabbit.”
I looked up, startled.
“There was no way he could have braked in time,” Lucy clarified.
“Still,” Laurel added with a shrug. “It seems like a bad sign.”
* * *
That afternoon, I prepped the greenhouse for a hard freeze that was supposed to happen overnight. I covered all the beds in burlap and made sure the rough fabric was secured. Then I moved the smaller containers away from the surfaces that would get the coldest, off the ground and away from the plastic tarp walls. By the time I left, all the little plants were huddled together on a couple of tables in the middle of the greenhouse. I covered those tables in burlap as well. If I could’ve, I would’ve plugged in a small space heater, but I didn’t want to risk the old electrical system of the school. There was no guarantee everything would survive, but it was the best I could do.
The sleet started as the sun went down, just as I was driving home from school, and, that night, I fell asleep to the sound of ice pinging against the windows. The next day was Thursday, and school ended up getting canceled because the roads were too dangerous to drive on. I let my phone run out of batteries and took three baths in a row, draining and then refilling the tub with hot water each time it got lukewarm.
The school reopened on Friday, and I was up at the greenhouse before the sun was fully up. It was clear that something had gone wrong. The door was partially open, but I didn’t know how that could’ve happened. I’d locked the door when I left. Of course I’d locked the door when I left. When I entered, I saw piles of brown on brown—burlap and dirt and dried-up leaves and stems, all mixed up. Everything was shrunken, crisp, the deadest of the dead. One table was shifted into a diagonal, and the other was tipped completely on its side. There were empty planters all over the place. I took a few more steps inside, and that’s when I noticed the flash of color on the ground. It was out of place and the brightest blue: bird feathers—no, the entire wing of a bird—torn off and spread out. I crouched down, sifting gently through the dirt and lifting the loose pieces of burlap, but I couldn’t find the head or the body, just that one wing.
As for what had happened, I could only guess. The bird had flown in through the door that I’d somehow (how?) left open. A larger animal, like a squirrel or a cat or a raccoon, had rushed in after it. In the great, big battle that ensued, the tables had been bumped, and the plants had fallen. The burlap had come loose. The bird had lost its life and was probably eaten. The plants that hadn’t been knocked completely from their soil had been exposed to the cold from the open door. I glanced over and saw that the little squash bud that Laurel had been fiddling with the other day had shriveled on its vine.
I sat on the cold, concrete floor and cried for the plants. Then I cried for myself because just when I’d started to think that maybe I wasn’t terrible at keeping things alive, I was proven wrong.
Eventually, I heard movement at the door and looked up to see Lucy and Laurel standing there. Lucy was frowning. Laurel was holding a cup of hot cocoa and taking in the destruction.
“This is, for sure, a bad sign,” she said.
IV: ECHINOCEREUS
In all that destruction, there was a miracle: a hedgehog cactus, alive. Somehow, an empty planter had flipped and fallen on top of it, offering a perfect shell of protection.
The hedgehog cactus didn’t need sun and fresh air to grow, but I figured neither would hurt. Much of the roof was still covered with ice, but the outside temperature was warmer than it had been the last couple of days. I carefully slow-walked the cactus across the slick roof and placed it on a west-facing ledge. Then I took a step back to gaze at the bluebonnet-blue sky.
“What happened up here?”
I turned to see Mateo. He was wearing a green-and-black flannel, dirty and wrinkled and with a little white stain, maybe a smear of dried toothpaste, across the collar.
“Something got into the greenhouse,” I said. “I don’t know how. It’s a total wreck. That’s the only thing that survived.”
I pointed at the cactus, smiling, so clearly proud of the little plant that lived.
“I think there’s something wrong with you, Drea,” Mateo said.
That wasn’t what I was expecting him to say, but it also wasn’t a lie.
“Well…” I snorted. “Well … yeah.”
“You don’t regret what we did.” Mateo advanced toward me, taking steady steps on the ice. “Even now. All you care about are your plants.”
“And what did we do?” I shouted, repeating myself from the other day. “Duncan was already dying.”
“Bullshit!”
Mateo rushed forward, and suddenly we were close, less than a foot apart. It was closer than we’d been in a long time, and I could feel the raw emotion cracking brightly between us. We were yelling at each other, yeah, but it was something. It felt real.
“You didn’t see him like I did,” I said. “He was crushed and barely breathing.”
Mateo, clearly bothered by the word crushed, took a hard swallow and looked down to the space between the toes of our shoes.
“He was my friend,” he said.
“I know,” I replied.
“We could have helped him.”
“No.” I put my hand, dirty fingers spread wide, on his chest. “He’s gone, and we need to move on.”
I said it as much for me as I did for Mateo. We were in this together. We.
Mateo wanted to touch me—I could tell by the way his fingers were fluttering at his sides, twitching in and out of loose fists. I was certain we were finally fusing together again after tragedy—two tragedies—had threatened to rip us apart. He was weak right now, but I could build him back up. I was ready.
One of my hands was still on Mateo’s chest, and the other one went to my stomach. I’d felt the kick there, under the scratchy fibers of my sweater, under skin and muscle.
“He’s gone,” I repeated. “This is our chance now.”
Mateo looked up to meet my gaze. He shifted his weight to the right, onto his bad ankle. The movement was subtle, but I knew what he was doing: testing its strength.
“I don’t know,” he said.
I moved my hand from Mateo’s chest to his cheek, an
d he leaned into me, nuzzling like a cat.
“I don’t know,” he repeated.
But then Mateo reached for my hand, the one that was against my stomach, and gripped it.
“Sweet Little,” he whispered. “Little Sweet.”
* * *
After Mateo left, I spent the rest of the day trying to clean up the mess. When I went back to the ledge to check on the hedgehog cactus, school had been out for over an hour, and the sun was already going down. In a far field, people were practicing for track—running sprints and jumping hurdles. They were bundled up in matching sweats, and I could see their breath against the dark. The winter air smelled like smoke from a chimney.
Something off to the side caught my eye—a person. He was standing near the bleachers and was wearing a stained, gray sweatshirt. Once he saw that I was looking at him, he raised his arm. He didn’t wave it, though—just held it up in a semicircle over his head. It looked like it had that night in the field, when it was lying limp in the icy grass.
I gasped and took an awkward step to the side. My knee knocked against the planter that held the hedgehog cactus, causing it to teeter and then tip. When I reached out to catch it, my midsection collided with the ledge, and I huffed, extending my arm even farther, spreading my dirty fingers for the air-bound plant. The entire building tilted.
Out ahead of me and down, I could see the tiny cactus, rotating in the cold dark, and as I reached for it again, I felt a sting in the center of my palm from where a spine had lodged itself deep. The plant was soaring. I was soaring with it. My whole world was going end over end.
V: GHOSTS
Lucy and Laurel found me the next morning. They’d gone up to the roof with some hot chocolate, called my name around the greenhouse, and just as they were about to leave, saw an odd pile of loose dirt and some scuff marks near the western edge of the building.
Later that night, people from school gathered in the parking lot, just as they’d gathered for Duncan a few weeks before. They held candles speared through paper cups and said nice things about me.
“Poor Drea,” Laurel said.
Lucy nodded. “Yeah. Poor Drea.”
Everyone thought I’d fallen on purpose, finally weighed down by grief heaped on grief.
Mateo was there, standing next to the girls, but he wasn’t holding a candle. He was in that green flannel shirt from the day before, and when people would come by to offer him their condolences, he wouldn’t reply. He was still wilting, and I wondered if he’d ever recover.
I tried to get close and overlap myself with him or fold myself into him. I thought that maybe he could feel me the way I still felt my baby girl. Maybe I could be a flutter in his stomach.
Mateo was wilting, but he was also angry. I could tell. Losing so many things in a row—a baby, a teammate, a scholarship, a fiancée—can fundamentally change a person. It can make them feel like they’re hollow and filled to bursting at the same time.
I came even closer, so close, I could hear a series of clicks in Mateo’s jaw, like he was grinding his teeth. I tried to tell Mateo that I’d died trying to save a life—that instead of being angry, he should be proud. I don’t think he heard me, though. His hard gaze was directed across the lot, to a smirking Daniel. I knew that Mateo was going to act on his new anger, which wouldn’t turn out well.
Duncan had been the one who’d thrived on emotion. Mateo had always been the deliberate one. Because of that, I’d had to act for him. I don’t like to think about what might happen without me around.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Some interpretations of Macbeth (including the most recent film version featuring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard) have claimed that, just prior to the start of the action of the play, the Macbeths lost an infant child. Lines such as Lady Macbeth’s in Act I, “I have given suck, and know / How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me” support these interpretations. It makes some sense then that the trauma of the loss of a child coupled with the pair’s overall “vaulting” ambition influences their decisions. I’m a new mother. At the time that I’m writing this, my son is about to turn two. And, of course, having a child changes one’s thinking in a lot of ways. This story came about as I shifted to thinking about Macbeth as a play about the things people do when they have loved a child and are now torn down by grief.
LATE ROMANCE
LOST GIRL
Inspired by The Winter’s Tale
Melissa Bashardoust
A sad tale’s best for winter. I have one
Of sprites and goblins.
—ACT 2, SCENE 1
Perdita knew that Zal was different the first time she told him her name. Most people, upon hearing it, immediately mentioned the dog from 101 Dalmatians. When Zal’s eyes lit up at the freshman mixer she had been persuaded by her roommate to attend, she prepared herself for another comparison to a dog in a Disney movie.
Instead, he said, “Perdita, from the Latin perditus, meaning lost. With the feminine ending, it would be closer to something like ‘lost girl.’”
He was a classics major, Perdita soon discovered, hence the excitement over Latin.
She had asked her Aunt Polina once why she had given her that name. “It came to me in a dream,” was all Aunt Polina would tell her. Perdita wasn’t surprised by the lack of explanation—she was used to Aunt Polina not telling her things. Years of asking about her parents went nowhere, as did any questions about why Aunt Polina flew downstate so often and how they were paying for Perdita’s college expenses on Aunt Polina’s modest salary.
Perdita probably could have found out some of those answers, if she’d really wanted to. She could have done some googling, tried to find a trail of bread crumbs that would lead her back home, like Hansel and Gretel. But the thing about Hansel and Gretel is that their parents abandoned them in the woods to starve. Perdita didn’t want to know if she’d been left in the woods. It was easier to imagine that she’d just been born there.
Besides, she’d always liked the idea of living in the woods. “You chose which school to go to based on the trees alone,” Aunt Polina had said to her, teasing, and Perdita couldn’t even deny it. The first time she had stepped on the campus, visiting as a high school junior, she had felt a stronger sense of belonging than she had ever felt in her life. While everyone else on the tour was admiring the stone buildings and the giant library, Perdita’s eyes kept drawing back to the dreamy willow outside the science building, or the knobby London plane trees—currently bare, but full of promise—that lined the main plaza, or the eucalyptus grove that served as the western entrance to the campus. She had been thinking of majoring in plant biology but had quickly realized she didn’t want to study plants so much as be absorbed into them. She didn’t think there was a major for that.
About a month after they’d met at the mixer, when she and Zal were definitely dating but not quite ready to call it that yet, he took her up to the top of the clock tower on campus. She’d never gone inside, thinking it was for tourists, the kind of thing you showed your family when they visited for homecoming weekend. But Zal had gone up before, and he seemed excited about it, so maybe there was something worth seeing up there.
From the platform at the top of the tower, Perdita stared down at the campus’s red-tiled roofs and the clusters of trees. She pointed out which building was which in her mind, tracing out her regular routes to class and imagining herself winding through campus like a mouse in a maze. It was interesting but not particularly exciting, and a chilly wind kept whipping strands of her copper hair into her mouth. She started to ask Zal if they could go back down now but then saw the calm contentment on his face. He wasn’t looking at campus but rather straight ahead, at the water of the bay and the bridge that connected their side of the bay to the city, where his parents lived. He’d told her a little about his parents, that they owned a highly successful software company and that his dad was not thrilled with his only child’s choice of major or lack of interest in taking o
ver that software company one day.
She was still staring at him when his face broke into the most wonderful smile. “I just love seeing the water,” he said. “Even if it’s not the ocean, it’s close enough.”
Only now did Perdita actually look at the bay for itself, at the constant motion of the water, never quite still or steady. There was something about its surface that almost looked fake to her, like in kindergarten when the teacher would have everyone shake out a shiny, blue sheet to resemble a river.
“What do you think it’d be like to live underwater?” Zal asked her.
She shrugged. “My pastoral fantasies usually involve burrowing into a hollowed-out tree, personally. I think I’d get tired being a fish—always tossed around, no solid ground.”
“You’d get used to it, though,” he said at once, like he had already given underwater living serious consideration. “And then if you ever tried to stand on solid land, you’d probably wobble around.”
He started to sway back and forth to demonstrate. “Come on, wobble with me.”
Well, she couldn’t let him wobble alone, could she? She swayed in sync with him, trying not to laugh, and then he took her hands, and they were half swaying, half dancing. “See,” he said, “if you were a sea creature, you’d always be moving, just like this, always dancing. That wouldn’t be so bad, would it?”
He looked so earnest, dark eyes and long eyelashes magnified in the lenses of his glasses, wanting her to see the same beautiful possibilities that he saw when he looked out on the bay. But all she could think was that she was prone to seasickness and had never really learned how to swim beyond paddling around in the shallow end of a pool, so she would make a pretty pathetic sea creature.
