Summer in the City of Roses

by Michelle Ruiz Keil

  Allison gets the hose and sprays Red until he disappears.

  Jane twirls in her wedding dress, tattoo sleeves dark against the stark white skirt. She spins and spins. Mika and Allison join her. They twirl until the garden tilts and they all fall down onto the warm tilled earth.

  Lorna has never danced this well, every move more perfect than the last. All the dancers, the bouncers, the bartender, and every man in the audience are rapt. A customer approaches the rack and Lorna’s breath catches. A tiger dressed in a three-piece suit places a hundred-dollar bill on the stage.

  Lorna is lying on hot rocks near a gentle sea in a state of perfect pleasure. The enormous sandpaper tongue slides slowly down her spine, down each leg all the way to the soles of her feet. She turns her face to see him—the tiger, no suit, but a patch over one eye, like a pirate. “Do you want to wear this?” the tiger asks. “To cover your wound?”

  Lorna touches her face and there is . . . nothing. Nothing where her eye should be! Nothing! She screams, but no sound comes out of her mouth.

  She’s walking up the front steps to her dead grandma’s house in Tacoma, wearing the good-luck gold shoes she got at Shiny Dancer, and they refuse to be quiet. “Go on!” they dare her. “Go on!”

  “Screw you,” Lorna hisses. But she keeps on going, one step at a time.

  She feels for the key under the ceramic pig with the chipped snout and real rubber rain boots that once belonged to a doll of Lorna’s named Bitty. The pig never got a name. Just Pig.

  “If she’s dead, she’s dead,” Lorna tells the shoes, unlocking the door.

  The house smells like cat piss and garbage. Home sweet home.

  The TV is on upstairs, so you know the power bill was paid and someone was once alive enough to turn the damn thing on. Lorna thinks about hiding the shoes. She knows her mother will try to take them. But when she faces the staircase with its moldy brown carpet, she decides to keep her shoes on and take her chances.

  Mom is in bed.

  Georgie always thought Lorna was sending letters to an old boyfriend in Tacoma, but this is infinitely worse.

  This lady.

  Her mom.

  A boyfriend would be easier to leave.

  Even Georgie, the best kisser in Portland, was easier to leave.

  “Hey,” Lorna says from the doorway.

  Mom barely looks up. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she says like she’s saying hi back. “How many days, Lorna? How many days has it been?”

  “I don’t know, Mama,” Lorna says. “Why don’t you tell me?”

  Plum is in a Dublin pub, pregnant with her own grandmother. She drinks a glass of black beer and follows a familiar green coat out the door and around the back of the building. She is kissing a redheaded man for all she’s worth. This man is not her husband.

  Plum is in labor in her bathtub in Portland. Her belly ripples as she bears down. It’s early in the morning, and no one is awake. If she calls for her father, he won’t come. Since her mother died, he needs whiskey to sleep. She crouches now, hands on either side of the tub, and pushes. A large, silver-scaled fish slides out of her body and into the bathwater. It bumps its blunt head against her leg—a greeting and a farewell—and narrows its body to swim down the drain.

  George is on the back steps of Taurus Trucking with Nana. This is a lucid dream, George knows, downshifting time until it purrs along slow as a summer afternoon. George lifts Nana’s beloved hand and kisses it. Nana is in workday mode with unpolished nails, a little grease in her cuticles. George squeezes, and Nana squeezes back. She is very strong.

  George holds close this stolen moment between the worlds, rolling in the warmth of Nana, the fit of George’s head against her shoulder; the orange-sherbet-menthol-cigarette-green-tea scent of her. The way Nana’s pointy chin presses into George’s freshly buzzed scalp. They sit, content, grandmother and grandchild. Every detail gleams with precision, and George doesn’t know if this is a visit to Nana’s version of heaven or a relived moment from the past or random neurons sparking into a beautiful dream.

  “Georgie,” Nana says.

  “Nana,” George says back.

  They are silent. Cars pass now and then. Chickadees sing their names from the pine tree in the corner of the parking lot, and crows hop around the asphalt, pecking for the bread Nana feeds them every morning. A baby cries and children laugh. The wind rustles the neighborhood trees.

  17

  The

  Conservatory

  Iph is backstage with a team of dressers. She holds her hands up and a garment slips over her head, covering her everywhere. A second skin.

  She looks in the mirror, and she is her mother. She isn’t Gracia, the girl her mom was on her birth certificate and during the childhood she won’t talk about with anyone. She isn’t Gracie, the straight-A high school sophomore who dropped out and ran away. She’s not Callie, either—the name she says she got from her best friend, a boy she met when she first arrived in New York from California. She is Grace, the girl who came to New York alone at fifteen.

  The curtain rises. Lights fade up on a playground.

  Grace pulls her sweater tight, sliding lower against the wall. Up high in the little room made by the walls at the top of the slide, she is invisible from below. She knows because she propped her sweater up to her seated height earlier, slid down to the bottom of the twisty slide, and checked every angle.

  She curls up and closes her eyes. She’s almost asleep when she hears it: whistling. Someone’s on the swings. Grace grins. It’s a perfect rendition of the doot-do-doots in “Walk on The Wild Side.” He whistles the entire song, then moves on to “The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys.” She sits up and peeks over the edge of her playground fortress.

  Just as she thought—it’s the cute skinny blond boy she’s been seeing around. No, Grace thinks, skinny is too generous a word. That boy is a swing-set calavero. A skeleton whistling as he sways back and forth, a bottle dangling loosely from one bony hand.

  “I see you,” the boy drawls. He sounds a little like the girl from Kentucky Grace met on the bus. “Saw you go up there. Thought I’d try a Pied Piper approach to get you out.” He leaps off the swing, lands solid, and holds up the bottle. “Seems like a shame to drink it alone.” His cowboy voice is soft, but it carries.

  “You spent actual money on that? Instead of food and cigarettes?” Grace tries not to think about how empty she is now or the Automat cheese sandwich she ate yesterday morning or how she got the money for it. The taste of that is still bitter in her mouth.

  “Girl, who says I spent money?” He pulls a salami and a loaf of bread from someplace in his trench coat and walks over to an empty park bench. The other person in the park is an old woman snoring under a layer of newspaper. He motions for Grace to sit. “I’ll have you know, though—I am officially employed as of today. That’s why we’re celebrating.”

  “Where?”

  “Strip joint around the corner. I’m the bouncer, ma’am.”

  “Who do they think you’re gonna bounce? A bunch of rowdy kindergarteners?”

  “I’m not questioning their judgment. I’m happy for the cash. Tomorrow night, it’s gonna be a hotel room for your boy here. And a shower down the hall.”

  Grace sighs. She’ll probably be in a room tomorrow night, too—she’s getting to the point where she’s going to have to try and pick someone up. Her hair is stringy. And her period is due any day—for that, she’s going to need money for supplies.

  “You could dance over there, I bet. You’re pretty enough, that’s for sure.”

  “No ID,” Grace says.

  “You think they’re checking? Anyway, that’s my job now. Can you dance?”

  “That’s what I came here to do,” she says. She stands up on the bench and does her prettiest ballet curtsy, then plops down beside him. The skeleton boy hands her a
crusty piece of bread stuffed with salami. She picks up the sandwich and raises it in a toast. They clink and wolf down the food and trade gulps from the stolen bottle of Chianti.

  “I’m as full as a queen,” she says.

  “You think you’re the queen here?”

  “Oh, you’re a queen, all right. The queen of thieves!” Grace holds the bottle up in salute.

  “I’ve been called worse. But my mom calls me Rob.”

  She holds out her hand. “I’m Grace.”

  “Grace? That sounds like somebody’s great-aunt. Where are you from?”

  “California,” Grace says, chin out, daring him to ask her what she is. Although that doesn’t happen much here in the city. Most people assume she’s Puerto Rican.

  “Hmmm,” he says. “That’s more like it. That’s what I’m gonna call you from now on, so get used to it.”

  “Get used to what?” Grace laughs.

  “Your name. California. Callie for short.”

  “If you call me Callie, I’m calling you Queen Rob.”

  “Oh, I insist,” Rob says. He gets up and runs to the slide like they’re kids at recess.

  She runs after him, slides down . . .

  . . . and down . . .

  Iph is in a windowless room. There is a baby on the floor—her mother. Tiny. Maybe under a year. We are born with all our eggs, Iph thinks. The eggs that will become her and Orr are here, dormant for now, inside this brown dark-haired baby in a dirty onesie and saggy diaper. Little gold hoops hang from her ears. She’s playing with something on the floor. Behind her is a door. There are noises she doesn’t like. A woman, crying. Gracia’s mother? Iph’s abuela? The dream pans closer, zeroes in on baby Gracia’s toy. A severed finger! With a long, yellowed nail and a flaking gold-plated ring, the detached end caked with dried blood. Iph screams as Gracia lifts it toward her mouth.

  Iph takes the finger and puts it in the sink. Turns on the water, then flicks on the garbage disposal. Gracia cries for the finger, her only toy. Iph pats her pockets. She’s wearing Nana’s overalls. She pulls out a stick of eyeliner from one. Gracia reaches for the red pencil, pops it in her mouth. “No,” says Iph, taking it away. Gracia screams. Iph’s head is pounding. She reaches in her right pocket and pulls out a red-capped mushroom. This she eats herself to make sure the baby doesn’t get it. “It’s poison for you,” she tells her nine-month-old mother.

  Gracia reaches out her arms to be held. Iph picks her up, holds her close. The heaviness of the baby head on her shoulder is exhausting. She shifts her to a hip. A little hand reaches into the bib pocket of the overalls and pulls out a ring of golden keys. “Where there’s a key, there must be a lock,” Iph says. She searches the small room, but it is bare. She turns to the door, which has a cheap dented doorknob with no visible lock of any kind. She sets the baby down to search. As she runs her hands over every inch of the door, minuscule splinters penetrate her skin. Her palms burn. The pads of her fingers begin to bleed. The baby whimpers, then howls. Iph sits on the floor next to her, defeated. Then she sees it. There! On Gracia’s pink tongue! A small golden keyhole! A door opens from the cave of her baby mouth, and water pours out. The room fills, faster and faster. Iph stretches Gracia high in the air, away from the water that pours from her eyes and ears, as well as her mouth. Soon, they are both engulfed.

  Iph searches the water, frantic. Gracia is gone. She vomits, and out come the eels, brown and fanged and muscular. They crowd up into her throat, stampeding toward freedom. She gags until she is empty. Numb. She swims toward a light. A boy a little older than Orr is drifting here, long hair and love beads swaying like underwater flora. Iph touches his face. Dad’s face! Dad?

  The boy isn’t breathing. He is so heavy. The current pulls him away. Iph tries to follow, but the tide takes her to land.

  Dad is there on his knees in the sand. His stomach heaves, but there is nothing left inside him. He doesn’t see Iph. Doesn’t feel her embrace. He is sobbing. The boy in the sea is his brother. His brother who died, who killed himself by jumping off a bridge.

  Iph is lucid now and knows what to do. She reaches her hand into Dad’s chest. She pulls out his heart and rinses it in the sea. Lifts it to the sun until it is warm as blood. Then she places it back in his chest, holding her hand over the wound to close it.

  18

  Each Lace

  Frond of Horn

  Home, she said. Follow me!

  There was a moment in the woods when Orr truly thought the little dog meant to lead him home to Forest Lake. She’d found him after a run with the bucks, his body in an awkward state of almost-transformation, exhausted and alone. At the sight of the humble little brindled animal, a sweet and ordinary creature from the old world, he wanted nothing more than his room at home, with its line of flower-remedy tinctures on his neat bedside table and the sound of his parents laughing while they did the dishes together, listening to Mom’s classic rock or Dad’s cheesy jazz. Iph would be running the bath in the next room. He’d fall asleep without even the Walkman. He would wake up in his old life.

  He wept then. It was the tears that called back his human form, his shape of sorrow. The dog had tenderly washed his face, licking at the spots of blood where the velvet had frayed after his dangerous frolic with the bucks. After a time, he’d become more oriented.

  Now, approaching the familiar clearing, he sees that he is still in some enchanted corner of Forest Park. This dog must be Scout, the one who belongs to Iph’s friend George—the person who made his sister blush and look so happy. He sits for a moment, and Scout waits at his side. His head is heavy. The antlers have grown. Soon, the velvet will drop from them, leaving the bloodstained bone exposed until the sun blanches it.

  This time, the change was exultant and pitiless. Mulder would have loved it. “The Deer Boy”—a case for The X-Files if ever there was one.

  They are in the clearing now.

  Home is where your pack sleeps, Scout says without moving. Then she runs, as tired and paw-sore as she must be, body vibrating with joy at the prospect of reunion.

  Orr follows her slowly into the cottage. Already its magic is ordinary, incorporated. Maybe because his own body has already shown him the magic of the impossible world. I wonder, he thinks, did I cross over somewhere, or were things always this way and I didn’t notice?

  Orr opens the arched door and stands at the flowery threshold. It’s like looking into an enchanted snow globe. He feels large and distant but still deeply drawn to the action in the warm golden realm inside.

  Inside, Scout is in George’s arms.

  Inside, Iph is offering George a small red pot of some sort of ointment. “Poor little paws,” he hears Iph say.

  Inside, Plum is sleeping. He knows by her smell. He finds Jane and Allison the same way. Mika is asleep on the sofa in the corner, huddled next to a girl who was in the audience at the show.

  This is a place for him.

  He knows. Most of him knows.

  Home is where your people are.

  But it feels wrong to enter.

  “Orr!” Iph sees him. Grabs a blanket and rushes to put it around his shoulders. Opens her arms. He lets her hug him, because this he knows: his sister will always be able to show him the way home.

  She leads him in, and he collapses on the carpet. “I’m so tired.”

  “I bet.” Iph sits beside him. “Do you need food? A glass of water?”

  He looks up at her. “I’m fine. I ate and drank with the bucks.”

  He watches her take that in. All the improv training has made her mind so flexible. Or no—she was always this way. Empathetic and curious. Her natural gift.

  “I have an idea,” she says. “First, I have to ask—do you want to stop this?”

  Want. Orr hasn’t considered it in the context of a decision. Want is what calls him to run alongside the herd. But tonight
, after a while, even that want faded and changed. There was a time in a deep part of the forest where he made a bed of pine needles and rested alone. He dreamed the seasons changing—a thickening coat, bright leaves, the ground littered with apples. A secret place protected from rain and snow. The quickening spring. And . . . rest. A break from the world of talk and expectations.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “It’s lonely there. They let me stay with them. They’re curious. But they know I’m different. Even if I change completely, I think they’ll know. But Iph”—he takes her hand—“something about it also feels right.”

  “Maybe my plan can help you decide,” Iph says. “That’s what Plum thinks.”

  “Yes,” Plum says. She has wandered over, rubbing sleep from her eyes. “Hey,” she says to Orr. “How are you?”

  “I don’t know,” Orr says. He is naked under the blanket, which would have embarrassed him once.

  Plum settles cross-legged next to them as if this were a normal night and they’re all getting ready to play a hand of Uno. Orr smiles. Uno. It’s good he can still remember these things.

  “I want to try a ritual,” Iph says. “A kind of . . . psychodrama. It’s a thing from ancient Greece—they would act out people’s dreams as a type of medicine. I wonder if somewhere along the way, your narrative split. Like a whole part of you separated and went into this . . . other reality? Does that make sense?”

  “I was thinking that.” Orr nods. He almost topples backward, unbraced for the new weight there. He holds his ears to steady himself. They are softer than usual, beginning to fur. He pulls his hands away and sits on them.

  “They must be so heavy,” Iph says.

  “But also . . . so beautiful,” Plum says. Why is she blushing?

  Iph laughs. “Oh my god, Plum, do you think my brother’s hot as a deer?”

  Plum hides her face in her hands. Scout dances over to push her head under Plum’s fingers so she can lick her face. “You are so precious,” Plum tells Scout in a way that makes Orr a little jealous.