Summer in the City of Roses

by Michelle Ruiz Keil

  Iph nods. There’s no getting around it. She has to take off her shoes. She reaches down, but George stops her.

  “If you take them off now, you’ll never get them back on. They won’t let you into the hotel without them. I have alcohol wipes and ointment, but only two Band-Aids—I need to restock my first-aid stuff.”

  Iph looks around for a place to sit where her dress won’t be completely ruined. White seemed like such a great idea at the mall.

  “Let me,” George says. “We can at least do the heels.”

  “It’s so gross,” Iph says. “There’s blood.”

  “I have gloves.” George produces a pair of latex gloves and a first-aid kit from a well-worn messenger bag.

  “So you just . . . ride around at night, helping lost maidens and shooting ne’er-do-wells and dressing strangers’ wounds?”

  “Yep,” George says. “Lift your foot up, but not all the way out.” The cleanup and bandaging is gentle and precise. “There we go.” George takes off the gloves and stows them in a Ziploc bag.

  “Thank you,” Iph says. “That’s way better.”

  George smiles. “It’s nothing.” In a fluid motion, the messenger bag and bow and arrows are back in place.

  “Have you ever shot anyone with that thing?”

  “Once.” There’s a beat, a shift. Iph notes it and files it away. She’s always on the lookout for these in-between moments where everything breathes. “Find them onstage,” Mom’s director friend from New York once said, “and you can make magic.”

  Iph waits. George breaks the silence with a gesture at the ten-speed leaning against the wall. “Why don’t I take you? If you sit sidesaddle on the rack and hold on, I think we’ll make it. It’s not far.”

  “Are you sure?”

  George grins, one hand holding up the bike, the other holding open the flap of the messenger bag. Like a tiny gazelle, Scout leaps in. Even though it’s the worst night of her life, Iph laughs.

  “Milady,” George says, gesturing to the bike like it’s a chariot. Iph hobbles over and wriggles on. The relief of getting her weight off her feet is sweet enough that she doesn’t even care about her butt, which is far from comfortable on the narrow metal shelf. George stands to pedal, calf muscles impressive as they work.

  Iph grips the sides of the rack, careful to hold her feet away from the gears. Her shoes twinkle in the streetlights, cruel but pretty with their shiny gold leather straps and chunky four-inch forties heels. She found them in a box of Mom’s old stuff and brought them with her when Dad handed over his credit card and told her to get something nice for the party.

  The white cocktail dress saw Iph coming with its retro vibe and thick damask satin with the perfect amount of stretch—a necessity for serious boobs and hips. The wide straps hid her bra, and the sweetheart neckline did something amazing for her waist. When she put the shoes on and stepped out to look in the big three-way dressing room mirror, the saleslady whistled.

  “Just like a Spanish Marilyn Monroe!”

  Spanish. Mom has always hated being called that. The Spanish were, in Mom’s words, “pendejo colonizers.” She also hates Hispanic, which she considers basically same thing.

  Still, Iph knew what the saleslady meant and took it as a compliment.

  She held on to that good feeling all week. Which made it so much worse when Dad told her the real reason for the evening out. He didn’t invite her because he wanted her company. She was there so strangers could come into the house and kidnap her brother without her braining them with a cast-iron skillet.

  Take care of him, mija.

  That was the last thing Mom said when she left. Orr was too upset to come to the airport, so Dad and Iph were the ones to see her off. There had been a scene the night before. Mom almost didn’t go. Iph found her after Orr was asleep and Dad had retreated to his den, frozen in front of her closet, still not packed.

  “You have to,” Iph told her. “It will be me next year. Show me how to be brave.”

  Mom’s eyes cleared. She nodded. They held each other tight. They had been a team for so long, taking care of Orr. Making sure the world didn’t break him. “I’ve got this,” Iph told her. “He’s going to be fine.”

  Iph’s spine straightens. She opens her eyes to the now-clear night. She will find Dad. She’ll convince him. They’ll drive straight to that boot camp and get Orr back. Mom can stay at her residency, and Dad can deal with her fire-spitting fury when she gets home at the end of the summer and finds out what he did.

  George sits to coast down a small hill. The clean wind cools Iph’s face. She holds out her arms for a second, perfectly balanced. Scout peeks out of the messenger bag and grins. Even if everything else about tonight is abysmal, being rescued by these two is undeniably great.

  4

  The

  Smoke-Blue

  Forest

  Orr lies on a thin mattress that feels slightly better than nothing. Rocks press cold into his bones, but the pressure is oddly painless. Is this what it feels like to be dead?

  He rubs the thick paste stuck in his lashes but doesn’t open his eyes. He imagines he is Uncle Marcos on the Greek side of the family, who would open one eye to light his first cigarette of the day and only open the second when it was smoked down to the filter. Marcos sat propped against his pillows and drank coffee for cigarette number two.

  One eye is all Orr needs to see that it’s very dark. He hears the woods around him, fur against fir, frog song, the rustling of dreaming birds. The second eye is easier.

  He’s in a tent. A dirty-sock-smelling sleeping bag is draped over him.

  He sits up. Something is wrong. It’s a static in his ears, something missing. A sting on his earlobe where the clippers have cut.

  Orr remembers now: the barbed-wire fence that stopped him, being dragged back to the lodge with its wood-fire common room and silent, watching boys. The adults were the ones from the van. The Minotaur man kept him still, his muddy boot resting on the chair an inch from Orr’s crotch.

  There was a string of words meant to unnerve him. Things he heard in middle school, names people called him. Words Mom said no one should ever use. Orr pans out on the memory, adjusts the angle. It’s one of his tactics, maybe his best. He can turn the sound of any memory on or off. He can pause, rewind, fast-forward.

  He zooms in on the scene in the lodge. The men holding him look less like men and more like older teenagers. College age at most. They’re in charge, though. Of him and all the other boys.

  One of them, maybe the one who drove him here, is saying the worst things. He’s angry Orr ran, angry he won’t stay still. Maybe Orr hurt him with his flailing. He keeps the sound on at first. The driver is holding his shoulders, calling him dirt surfer. This is a new one—probably a slur for hippie, referring to Orr’s long hair. It’s a dumb insult and easy to reject. Orr and his hair are always clean.

  The sound goes off. He knows what’s coming next—a bad word for someone who is Chinese, also inaccurate when it comes to his ethnicity. But Orr is used to being misclassified. The whole Santos Velos family has a look Dad’s New York family jokingly calls “mystery ethnic.” Mom and Dad both dislike the term but let them say it anyway. “It’s not the worst thing I’ve been called,” Mom always says.

  “We’re American,” Dad counters, raising his thick eyebrows at Mom like he’s daring her to disagree. “As American as anyone.”

  “Ha!” she says. Then she sighs. “I don’t know, my love. The kids are mestizo, right? Mixed.”

  But Orr doesn’t like that one, either. It makes their family sound like cake batter.

  Orr knows the Meadowbrook guys don’t care what he is, not really. They want to find his weak spots. The worst one wants to punish him.

  Orr fast-forwards to a slur for a gay man or boy, something Orr has heard countless times since elementary school.
It’s a throwaway in terms of insults. Mom’s dancer friends visit a few times a year from New York and use that word with affection or neutrality. But Mom never uses it, so neither does Orr. He’s still not sure if it applies to him. Mom says he can decide when he’s ready.

  The final insult is kind of ironic. Another elementary school taunt with roots in one of the best things about being half-Mexican—Mom’s creamy, perfect refried beans, the ones she says are like her abuela’s. Not that he would know. He’s never met a single person on Mom’s side of the family, and she refuses to talk about it. Ever. “I took the food and left the rest,” she always says. “It was the one thing worth taking.” Orr wonders now, like he always does, why that’s true. Why nothing and no one from Mom’s past is worthy.

  By the time Orr thinks that one through to its logical end, he’s not angry, only hungry. Or he would be, except he’s not in his body anymore. Just floating around like a big naked brain in a giant pickle jar. This is Orr’s way. He can spend full days in his head uncoupling sense from sensibility. It takes time and precision, like disarming a bomb. But now, in this cold, lonely moment, Orr needs to do something real.

  He tries a formerly rejected calming exercise of Mom’s to make it safer. He lies back down. The ground is there, holding him. He sends a cleansing breath in through his nose, past his heart, solar plexus, belly, and root chakras, down into the molten core of the earth.

  In. Out. In. Out.

  Images emerge, abstract at first. Ordinary moments at home. Dad. Iph. Mom.

  Mom. The night before she left. Her suitcase. Clothes piled on the bed.

  NO.

  Orr shakes his head like it’s an Etch A Sketch he’s erasing.

  He goes back to the van, his attempted escape, the lodge.

  The chair, the men, the silent, watching boys. The memory stops.

  He rewinds a little. Presses play.

  Metal bites his neck. The Minotaur-man moves him like he’s a puppet.

  That’s Orr’s crime, the reason he’s here. His father wants a real boy.

  “Bad Pinocchio,” Dad says, “believing that fox was your friend.”

  “Bad people,” Mom says, “villainizing the fox. It’s men who lie, not animals.”

  “Corvids can.” Dad grins. “Crows, ravens, and jays. They’re smart enough to lie.”

  When Orr was little, he was afraid of everything: the vastness of the sky, the weight of a roof over his head, the grating sounds of machinery, the feel of certain substances on his skin. But Mom had been there. Mom and Iph.

  From the start, he understood that they were a team. When Dad was home, he always pushed. He wanted his son to throw and catch, to ski, to snowboard, to golf.

  Dad called it love, but it wasn’t love.

  Dad pushed so hard, it was almost like he wanted to prove Orr’s unworthiness. In the end, Orr’s high-pitched keen always exposed Dad for the fake he was. He would yell and slam doors. Things the kids were never allowed to do.

  To be fair, when Orr was three, four, even five, the wailing upset Mom, too. It probably upset the entire county—it was that loud. Sometimes, back then, Mom covered her ears and rushed to her room and closed the door. A few times in the car, she even cried. Orr hated upsetting her but was unable to change. Then Mom read a book about sensitive people and various coping methods, which she passed along to Iph and Orr. They made a game of it, spotting freak-outs before they erupted. They learned calming yoga poses. They meditated. They all learned to be kinder, gentler. Even Dad. But instead of laughing, he would go silent. Instead of meditating, he escaped to his den and shut the door.

  As Orr got older and started running, he freaked out less often. Now he hardly ever does. But when he was little, it happened almost daily. Mom protected him, but for important things—things Orr needed to learn no matter how hard they seemed—his mother endured.

  Whatever happened, Mom knew what to do. When kids called him a girl for his long hair, she took him to the mall to get a tiny gold earring. When his father complained, she brought home romance novels from the grocery store with long-haired, muscular, earringed men on the covers to put on Dad’s bedside table. Mom knew Orr’s hair was important. He needed its weight against his back, its rosewater curtain of protection around him wherever he went.

  Mom taught him everything he knows about love. About being good. So he knew what to say when the letter came, inviting her to a prestigious residency in California to finish the epic dance piece she’d been working on since he and Iph were toddlers. Iph kicked him under the dinner table to make sure he said congratulations like he meant it.

  Leading up to the residency, Orr tried to tell himself it would be like her other trips, just longer. In the past, he’d made it through by reading a book a day and buying and rationing a party-size bag of M&M’S. Doable, if just.

  This time, she would be gone for three months.

  That was ninety books. Eighteen jumbo bags of M&M’S.

  Mom was worried, too, so she made lists and printed them out at Dad’s office. A daily schedule with reminders and little jokes. She thought it would help, but it didn’t.

  Orr is sobbing now, his stress level rising fast. Tears run down the sides of his face and sting his nicked scalp. He reaches to rub them away and finds that his wrists are still bound with plastic ties. His body seems to exist in parts. Are his legs even attached? A wiggle of his toes tells him they are. Now that his eyes have adjusted to the dark, he sees the shape of the tent around him: small, too short to stand in. In the corner, there is a pile of something soft—his hair!—and in it, a small breathing something.

  He crawls to the foot of the mattress and lies on his stomach. A mouse has made good use of his shorn hair, tucking her brood of children into the silky pile. Orr smiles and thinks of the Redwall books with their poetry and ale-loving rodents. He makes the tiny sounds his neighbor’s guinea pig, Estelle, prefers, but a little softer in deference to the mouse’s smaller stature.

  The mouse mother meets his gaze. She rises from the pile of nursing children and comes closer. She is a brown mouse, proof that mouse-brown should never be used as an insult. Her coat is the color of softness. Of late afternoon. Of small, warm safety.

  Orr holds his breath.

  On her hind legs, she sniffs the zip ties on his wrists and looks at him again. With her tiny hands braced on either side of Orr’s right wrist, the mouse begins to nibble.

  Orr thought Mom was the one who had a way with animals. The family of feral cats that live on the wooded edges of their half-acre yard allow her alone to pet them. Last fall, they found an injured falcon on the highway. Mom was the only one who could go near him. She’s saved countless songbirds and more than one baby squirrel. Dad calls her a wood witch. The Lady of Beasts. Now it seems that Orr has some of her magic.

  Orr smiles at the feel of mouse breath on his sensitive inner wrist. The mouse mother makes quick work of the right tie and moves to the left. She’s so careful, he never once feels teeth.

  The metal-on-metal sound of the tent zipper makes the metal in Orr’s fillings ache. It’s cold outside. Mountain cold. One more clue about where he is.

  The lights are out in the building that houses the boys. The row of cabins under the stand of firs is also dark. He holds very still.

  Even though Orr is fifteen, he doesn’t often go places alone. In fact, the only places he’s ever gone without Mom or Iph are the country roads around their subdivision. But of course he recognizes the white cap of the mountain behind him. Out-of-town business associates of his father’s always ooh and ahh at the postcard perfection of Mount Hood, visible from the city on clear days. Iph always scoffed at it. “A little much, don’t you think? Like it knows everyone’s looking.”

  This always made Dad laugh. “A mountain can’t be conceited.”

  “Umm, tell that to poor Mount Saint Helens,” Iph sa
id, pointing to the mountain’s cropped top, her peak flattened when the volcano inside her bubbled to the surface.

  Orr swears he remembers the day it happened, even though he wasn’t quite two. They’d woken to a pale dusting of ash over everything. Fairy snow, Iph had called it, padding to the deck in her footie pajamas.

  The mountain is much closer now, less a postcard than a sentinel. Meadowbrook must be in the forest at its feet. If Orr walks with the snowcap at his back, he will eventually find his way home.

  The thought stops him.

  Home.

  His heart races, his breath a warm cloud in the air.

  Home. To Dad. The person who’d authorized his kidnapping, his shearing, who was probably paying a lot of money to transform Orr into someone he wanted to call his son.

  Orr is dizzy. He feels for pockets, but his pajamas don’t have them. No vial of homeopathic anxiety medicine. No EpiPen.

  He opens his mouth to call out . . . to who? Mom, all the way in California? Iph, who’s probably so freaked out she’s snagged one of Mom’s sleeping pills?

  There is no one.

  He falls to his knees.

  He lies down on the ground.

  Pine needles lisp above him, mocking the tic of his grade school years.

  He closes his eyes and gropes for the hologram of home that he carries inside himself. It’s something he made to sustain him on the long days at school before Mom decided to keep him home. It never changes in his hologram world—always summer, always twilight, that perfect moment five minutes before nightfall when the sky turns indigo, a color his mother calls “our blue” because she and Orr love it equally.

  Sobs gather in Orr’s belly. The hologram can’t help him. Nothing can.

  Something cold touches his face, then something warm.

  A nose, he guesses. A tongue.

  He opens his eyes. Amber gleams down into his brown. Moonlight shines in a mouthful of teeth.

  He sits up.

  The coyote sits down.

  If Orr had been raised by someone besides Mom, he might have been afraid.