Summer in the City of Roses

by Michelle Ruiz Keil

  14

  The Drama

  of Life

  As the night deepens, things happen on their own in the cottage. Lamps light. Windows open to let in the cool evening air. Fairy lights turn on in the garden. Plum discovers the laden table first.

  “Everyone come out here!” she calls.

  Mika looks up from a conversation with Lorna. Holds out her hand to help Lorna off the deep-cushioned sofa in the corner. Iph shoots a look at George and gets a raised eyebrow back. Jane and Allison are swearing their appreciation at the wooden table in the garden piled with food.

  “Holy shit!”

  “Hell yes!”

  There are kebabs of grilled vegetables and tofu, shiny with olive oil and green with fresh rosemary. There is a salad of spinach, strawberries, and feta cheese. There is elote—corn on the cob Mexican-style, grilled with butter and chile and squash blossom enchiladas. There is seashell pasta, bright with moss-green pesto and studded with forest mushrooms and tiny yellow flowers. There is a bowl of whipped cream, a platter of blackberries, and five kinds of pie.

  They sit and eat. Plum is next to Iph.

  “I kind of wondered why he didn’t talk much about you. I figured it was either because you guys were super close or not close at all.”

  A little bit of guilt drains away. Iph is always surprised how much she has stored in her well. The Furies’ song plays in her head. Don’t say sorry. Don’t be sorry. She’s trying.

  “He’s perfectly fine out there, you know,” Plum says.

  “Trust her.” Jane has a kebab in one hand and elote in the other. She looks like Caesar, still dressed in her red toga from the show. “She’s hella uncanny. Her mama was a fortune teller.”

  “It’s true.” Mika nods. Mika is also wearing the toga, but under the Trail Blazers hoodie Iph and George got from the Heathman’s lost and found. It goes past her knees.

  Iph likes Mika. She’s a curious combination of reserved and a little shy without seeming insecure. And Iph isn’t the only one who’s curious. Lorna is across from Mika looking almost better after being up all night than she did in line for the show. She lowers her lashes at Mika, whose eyes widen.

  “Are we talking séances? Should I be scared?” Cait asks. Iph notes her seating choice—right next to Mika. She’s subtler than Lorna but possibly even more devastating. Her barely-there smile has everyone smiling back.

  “Maybe a little,” Mika says. “But I’m pretty sure Plum uses her powers only for good.”

  “How about you?” Lorna says, meeting and holding Mika’s gaze. “Do you use your powers for good?”

  Mika is bright red. She touches her cheeks. “It’s the wine,” she says, raising her glass to take another gulp.

  “Did your mom have one of those Psychic Reading shops you see around?” Josh asks. He has been silent since they sat down to eat, already on seconds. He looks skinnier than he did a week ago. Iph wonders—where does he sleep? “My mom used to go to one when we lived in Oakland—” He stops. Iph can’t tell if it’s the mom or the psychic Josh doesn’t want to talk about.

  “No shop. My mom was a therapist,” Plum says. “But also a great tarot reader. My deck used to be hers.”

  “Used to be?” Iph catches her eye. Plum is so pretty, with those gorgeous freckles and fox-fur brows. Orr has excellent taste—in girls, of all things! Iph’s guess had been boys for her brother, but maybe she was projecting her own queerness onto him. Or maybe he likes boys, too.

  “Cancer,” Plum says. “Don’t be sad, Janey.” She reaches across the table for Jane’s hand. “I’ve been feeling her lately, you know? She wants us to move on.”

  Jane wipes her eyes with the backs of her hands and presses her palms onto them, rose tattoos where her eyes were.

  “Your eyes just turned into roses,” Iph says. Maybe this place will change them all.

  “How bad did they hurt when you got them?” George asks.

  “A lot,” Jane says. “But they’re my favorites.”

  “So, Iph,” Allison says, “what’s going on? It seems like nothing has been the same since Orr found us that day. What’s the story with your family?”

  Iph tells the group their story: Mom and Dad meeting at the party, falling in love. Writing letters for two years while Dad finished college and secretly started building Mom their house. How the two of them shared a tiny trailer in the meadow until the house was finished, and how they got married under the hawthorn tree where Orr’s treehouse is now, just the two of them and a pagan priestess in a white robe and motorcycle boots. How things got hard. How they went wrong.

  “It sounds like you all really love each other,” Plum says.

  Iph sighs. “Love isn’t the problem.”

  They’re silent now, just eating and drinking and listening to the crickets.

  Finally, Cait says, “Um, I keep wanting to ask this. If you guys knew someone.” She looks at Mika, Allison, and Jane. “My sister was in a band a few years ago. In Olympia. The Athenas? Have you ever heard of them?”

  Jane stands up, knocking a fork off the table. “Cait, is your sister Britta?”

  “Yeah,” Cait says, barely audible.

  Jane sits. “I should have seen it the second I met you. You look just like her. I was in her band when they were the Grizzlies. Right before I moved back to Portland.” To Plum, Jane says, “That was the friend who died right after your mom.”

  “That was a horrible year.” Cait puts her fork down.

  “I knew Britta,” Mika says. “Just a little. She dated my roommate for a while when I lived in Seattle. I played at her memorial show.”

  “She was a kickass bass player,” Allison says. “I was such a fan. Dude, you do look just like her.”

  “It’s wild that you all knew her,” Iph says.

  Jane nods. “That’s the music scene. Especially coming out of Olympia.”

  “Not many girls,” Mika says. “We tend to know each other.”

  Lorna reaches across a plate of berries to touch Mika’s hand. Josh puts an arm around Cait. George raises a wineglass. “To our beloved dead.”

  “To your nana,” Mika says in the after-toast quiet. “I loved being at Taurus Trucking last night. It’s so cool that she came back after internment and did something so badass. My family was first generation, all in Hood River. Half of them were sent to a camp in Idaho and half to California. Those two parts of the family don’t really know each other now.” Mika takes a long drink of water. “They had a fruit market, but it was taken from them. They never came back here.”

  “To Nana,” Iph says. “And Mika’s family.”

  The ruby liquid in their glasses is somewhere between wine and ambrosia, whatever that’s supposed to taste like. It’s cool going down Iph’s throat but warm in her belly.

  “To Britta,” Josh says.

  “And my mom,” says Plum.

  They raise their glasses and drink again.

  There is a silence filled with the whispers of the dead, other losses too sore in their hearts to mention. Parts of themselves they buried long ago.

  “To the ghosts in all of us,” Iph says.

  All glasses are raised.

  They return to the food. The talk dissolves into twos and threes. People drift from the table.

  “Plum,” Iph says, “can we consult your tarot cards? Like, maybe just a three-card reading? I have an idea, but I need some sort of structure to start.”

  “Structure. Huh,” Plum says. “That’s a nice way of thinking about the tarot. Do you read?”

  “My mom does,” Iph says. “She uses it like this—that’s what made me think of it. She’s a choreographer and sometimes when she’s stuck, she’ll draw some cards to get her going again.”

  “My dad used to do that,” Plum says. “When he played music. He has this weird deck from the s
eventies called Oblique Strategies by this musician guy—what’s his name?”

  “Brian Eno,” Jane calls from across the room.

  “Yes,” Plum says. “Eno. I’ll go get my backpack. I left it someplace around here.”

  To Josh and Cait and George, who are clustered around a firepit that is now burning brightly inside a circle of Adirondack chairs, Iph says, “Do you guys have any training in improv?”

  “Yes!” Josh says.

  “Yes, and.” Cait laughs.

  “Good answer,” Iph says. “Sit tight. Plum and I have some witching to do.”

  15

  Bits & Tasks

  Indoors, the cottage flickers with candlelight. The workroom is rearranged with the tables pushed up against the walls, leaving an empty space in the center of the room. A large round carpet takes up most of the space with its forest pattern of red-capped mushrooms and stylized banana slugs on a background of deep green and pale gold. Iph and Plum sit in the center. Plum unties the moth’s-wing silk scarf wrapped around her cards. These, too, are round, their colors and card backs echoing the carpet, the forest, the room’s gold glow. Plum shuffles and hands the deck to Iph.

  Iph grounds herself the way Mom taught her—rooting her energy down past the carpet, past the foundation of this old house and the worm-rich soil beneath it, deep down to the roots of the surrounding trees. Orr, she thinks. What does he need? She holds the deck. It feels good in her hands. She shuffles and chooses—once, twice, three times.

  Plum turns over the first card. Death. “So,” she says. “The way I read them, the cards tell a story. So Death is like the ‘once upon a time’ of the reading.”

  Iph must have a look on her face that betrays what’s happening in her stomach, because Plum grabs her hand. “I know it’s not literal,” Iph says, squeezing back.

  “It’s about transformation.” Plum’s voice is high and sweet. It’s an odd combination, this woman-level wisdom and forthright girlishness. “The snake in the foreground—that’s about change and rebirth. The tree, too. Birches also shed their skin. The skeleton on the card—it’s what we need to mourn to really change. Sometimes you have to let stuff go to make room for something new.”

  Orr does need to release something. And according to the books Iph just read, the only way to stop him from transforming so radically is to find the fork in his path that allows another choice.

  Plum turns over the next card. “The Four of Discs,” she says.

  “Does that look a little like the inside of this house to you?” Iph squints to get a better look at the card. There’s a woman in a white robe inside a cozy room with a fire and open beams along the roof. Art on the walls. She is holding on to the door—to open or close it, it’s hard to tell which.

  “It does!” Plum says. “It’s about being in a safe place where you can decide something. We’re at a pause point—a time where we can either open the door to something new or close it against something unwanted.”

  “What about the third card?”

  “Another four—interesting. The fours are about the completion of a cycle. In the I Ching, the fourth hexagram is called Youthful Folly. In this deck they’re having some sort of party. Plus, it’s the Wands—power, energy, will, sex. To me, this says Rite of Passage. It says ritual. So yeah.”

  “That’s good, right? It feels like we’re on the right track. We need to do some sort of ritual, some rite to help him.” There is a word for this from one of the books—a word that is a combination of ingesting and incorporating. Like a snake eating its own tail. Iph flashes on Velma’s book of poetry, the snake image on the front. The title—Ouroboros. Integrate. That’s it!

  “He needs to integrate it—whatever energy he has right now that’s manifesting as a deer. Then it can become a part of him without taking over. Does that sound right to you?”

  Plum pauses and wrinkles her nose. Iph likes her more and more by the second. After a lifetime living alone with Orr on the island of misfit toys, it’s still a shock that they’re suddenly out here in the world, their lives webbing with others’ lives, making the kind of friendships that vine and flower and last.

  “I mean, yes,” Plum says. “Integrate sounds right. But Iph—he needs our help to choose what’s right for him. I mean, have you asked him what he wants? I see this ritual as more of a way to help him decide. Like, this could take him over before he realizes it’s happening—and that’s scary. He’s very impulsive, you know.”

  Iph does know. She wraps her arms around the ache of it. What if he doesn’t come back? It’s what they’re both thinking.

  They sit, quiet, for several minutes as the fire crackles.

  Plum sighs. “How long ago did Scout leave?”

  Iph shakes her head. “Time is weird here. When did you arrive?”

  “We left Taurus Trucking at around six, and it only takes about twenty minutes from there to the trailhead. But then we walked forever until Scout found the right trail. It’s so dark now. It must be at least after ten.” Plum yawns. “Sorry,” she says, covering her mouth. “We were up all night.” She folds the silk scarf back around her tarot cards. “Deer are crepuscular. Active mostly at dusk and dawn. I have a feeling he’ll be back by sunrise. Unless Scout can get him.” She gets up and stretches and heads to the window seat. “I’m gonna rest for a few minutes.”

  George and Josh and Lorna and Cait and the Furies wander in a few at a time, talking softly. A delicious scent wafts from the kitchen. George goes in and comes back carrying a tray with nine cups of hot cocoa and a plate of fresh-baked almond cookies.

  “I’m never leaving this place,” Jane says. “Just so you guys know.”

  “This is the best cocoa I’ve ever had,” Cait says.

  “It’s Mexican hot chocolate,” Iph says. “With cinnamon. The kind my mom makes.”

  “Not mine,” Josh says. “Mine is totally Swiss Miss from the packet with the little freeze-dried marshmallows—my all-time trailer park favorite.”

  “Mine’s a ringer for the kind they make at Stumptown on Belmont,” Mika says.

  Jane’s and Allison’s are extra thick with a mint leaf on top—just like at brunch at the Cuban place in Northeast.

  The fire crackles as they sip and talk a little, trailing off. Mika and Lorna are on the sofa, curled up together under a blanket. Jane and Allison and Josh and Cait have wandered into the bedrooms. Iph gets an extra blanket and throw pillows from the sofa and lies next to George, who is crashed out in front of the fire. She might rest her eyes, too. Just for a minute.

  16

  The Little

  Theater

  Cait is covered in trash. It sticks to her hair in slimy clumps. To her face. To her dress, which is pink as a piglet. Rotting vegetables and old Kleenex and clumps of dirt stick to her skin. And Cait is happy about it. She finds a pit of mud and rolls in it. She then rolls on the newly mowed lawn of her parents’ country club. Dry grass sticks to the entire mess like she’s one of those candies coated in chopped nuts. People—her parents, their colleagues from the law firm, her next-door neighbors, her orthodontist and pediatrician—are picnicking on the golf course. She stomps over their blankets to reach all eighteen holes. Inside each plastic cup, wedged into the sod, is a small animal. These she rescues and carries away in a basket. The birds and mice and chipmunks and frogs and little garter snakes all sit prettily together, taking great care not to upset one another with any sudden movement.

  Now she is at the river. She sets the basket down. She sits in the mud at the river’s edge, waiting. A person approaches. Britta. She holds out a hand. Together, they walk into the river. When the water reaches their shoulders, Britta dissolves but is still present. Cait’s hair grows until it brushes her ankles. She begins to sing.

  Josh is on his knees, puking off a bridge. Luminescent fish flop from his mouth into the bay far below, one after the oth
er. He sees them glowing in the black water as they swim toward the open sea. His body is bruised and bloody. He is finished with this life of cold sidewalks and winter shelters, sleeping with his shoes under his head so no one will steal them. Finished with the men in the cars and alleys and the pain in his jaw and the way his hair never ever feels clean. His face is swollen from being hit. His fists are hot from hitting back. He is strong for how skinny he is, for how hungry he is. He stands. The bridge is the color of Cait’s nails—the orange of coral reefs, not golden. When did he hitchhike all the way back home? He is climbing the supports like the bridge is a ship and he is a sailor. The breeze throws his scent back at him, and he gags again. His wounds are already rotting.

  Across the bay is the redwood forest. All he has to do is fall into the water and swim.

  He hears singing in the bay below, down near Angel Island. The words are in a language he doesn’t understand. He opens his own mouth and drinks in the sound. He exhales small green birds. His wounds begin to heal. His stomach feels full of wholesome food. His blood is clean, his skin is clear, his organs are unbruised. He stretches his arms out into the mist, and his hair whips behind him. He smells roses. He smells the sea. He climbs to edge of the support beam and leaps—not down, but up. Josh is flying. He reels and rolls and swoops and floats. Finally, he dives joyfully into the blue-black water.

  Jane, Mika, and Allison are tending the garden in the back of Penelope. They are singing together. The sun shines down.

  “What are you doing?” Red says from outside the fence.

  “We’re going on tour,” Mika says. “We need to have enough food.”

  “We got a record deal,” Allison says. “We need to get these tomatoes mulched.”

  “We’re getting married,” Jane says, smoothing the wedding dress down over her hips with her dirty hands. “We need wheat and berries for wedding cake.”

  Red shakes the gate.

  The Furies laugh and sing louder.