He couldn’t help how his voice turned the last word into a keening. Or how the wail in his mouth vibrated with the vines that sprouted without warning from the control board, from his backpack, from the stack of CDs on the table, from his own fingertips. The vines weren’t real—he knew that—they couldn’t really be Vanvoorstia bennettiana or Rafflesia borneensis—but they were perfectly accurate and they looked real. They felt real too, as they curled around his wrists, tucked shiny leaves into the crook of his elbows, pushed small sucker mouths into the skin of his upper arms. One thick shoot sprouting lacy algae leaves slithered up his arms and looped twice around his neck, snug but not tight.
The studio door opened a few inches, startling Jeremy. His time couldn’t be up already. The manager was rarely in the studio this late, but there she was, hair sticking out as if she’d been rousted out of bed. Did she sleep at the station? She spread her arms in a what’s-going-on gesture. Jeremy smiled and gave her a thumbs up, it’s-all-right response before returning to his notebooks. Somewhere he had an image of the Saint Helena Olive flower—miniature white trumpets with fuchsia gullets—that he drew from a photograph of the precious last living specimen. There it was!
“Nesiota elliptica was a small tree endemic to the island of Saint Helena in the southern Atlantic.” His voice deepened and his words became a requiem. “Threatened by timbering, plantation development, and the introduction of goats into their habitat, the last wild specimen died in 1994. A few cuttings survived in cultivation.”
The ruby-throated white trumpets budded and their annihilated blossoms flowered from the bones of his knuckles. He cleared his throat and pushed the words through, one by one. “Despite extensive efforts to rejuvenate the species, the last surviving St. Helena Olive seedling succumbed to a fungal infection in December 2003 and the St. Helena Olive Tree was declared extinct.”
The door opened again and this time a security guard followed the station manager into the studio. The manager’s face and her wrap-it-up gesture left no room for discussion: the program was over. He stumbled over the station identification, then punched in the underwriting message and two PSAs before switching off the mic.
Exhaustion and something else—relief maybe, mixed with sorrow—flooded over him. He stood and rubbed his eyes with both hands, surprised to find his cheeks wet. The station manager took the headset.
“That’s enough for tonight,” she said, her voice kind. “This program is over.”
“Were you listening?” he asked.
“No.” She took his seat at the control board. “The night shift security guard at the University Ave post called me. He was worried about you.”
Jeremy glanced at the guard. It was strange, given the circumstances, but he was pleased that someone listened, even if the guard was only moved to rat him out.
The security guard gripped Jeremy’s upper arm and led him outside. “Sorry, man,” the guard said, “but your roll call of extinction was majorly scary.”
“It’s okay.” Jeremy tried to twist away. “I’m fine now.”
“Sure. But I’m taking you over to Health Services. They’ll check you out.”
“Not necessary. I’m fine.” And he was. The vines were gone, and the tiny white trumpet flowers.
The security guard looked dubious.
“Really,” Jeremy said, giving the guard his best smile and a fist bump. “I’m cool.”
The guard tightened his grip on Jeremy’s arm. “Okay, you’re cool, but you’re still going to Health Services. We got liability, you know?”
The nurse practitioner had hoped to devote the last three hours of her shift to her backlog of paperwork. Shaking off fatigue, she waved the guard out of the exam room and hesitated in the doorway. Wondering how her new patient came to have café con leche skin with such blond curls, she smiled and introduced herself as Patty.
Jeremy liked that she used her first name, and that she didn’t wear a white coat, just a mustard-colored sweater the exact shade of a cat his family had when he was little. He liked that they sat next to each other on chairs instead of him perching on the crinkly paper on the exam table. She asked questions, her voice all silk-spoken and cushioned with concern like his mom’s, before everything went sour. Patty was about his mom’s age too, and just as pretty.
“Why am I here?” he asked.
“Because people are concerned. Something happened during your radio program?”
He was too surprised to answer. Could other people see the vines too?
“Your program? It’s about plants?”
“All these species are disappearing and people don’t seem to care.” Jeremy shrugged. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“You’re a biology major?”
“Botany. Plants and flowers. Trees, too. They’re so intricate when you really look at them. Amazing and so perfectly designed—whorls and ferns, branching and spirals—expressing Fibonacci numbers.” His voice trailed into silence as he recognized the blank look on the nurse practitioner’s face. Didn’t medical people study science?
“How do you hope people will feel when they listen to your program?”
Jeremy snorted. “I doubt if anyone listens, unless it’s just background noise to studying or getting laid. Nobody gives a hoot about the plants and that really bothers me.”
“What would you like your radio program to accomplish?”
“I don’t know exactly. The security guy called it a roll call of extinction and I like that. I want people to acknowledge what’s happening and to feel something.”
“What do you feel?”
“Sad,” he said. “Respectful. See, it’s like a vigil, a deathbed.”
“Can you tell me what happened tonight?”
No way. They’d never let him out. “It’s hard to explain. I felt incredibly connected to the extinct plants I was describing. That’s all. It’s no big deal. I just got carried away.”
“Has anything like this happened before?”
He shook his head. Not for many years, anyway, and that was none of her business.
“You seem to care very deeply. I’m wondering if you use alcohol or other substances to help you handle your feelings.”
“Nah. A beer every once in a while. For fun, not to handle anything.”
“Anything else you’d like to tell me?”
She wasn’t so bad and for a split-second he wanted to describe the vines, how they’d wrapped around him, hugged him so close, burrowed into him. Nope, not a good idea. Then she’d really think he was pathetic, or nuts. Was he nuts?
“Nothing else,” he said.
She paused, then asked softly. “Do you feel sad enough, angry enough, to hurt yourself?”
“It’s not like that. I don’t think so, anyway.” It was his turn to hesitate. Sometimes he pictured molecules from all the dead plants of the planet circulating through his arteries and veins, red blood cells mirroring the whorls and spirals of once-vital blooms. He imagined himself hemorrhaging their extinctions.
“Do you sometimes think about hurting yourself?” she asked again.
He didn’t have to. The dead plants were exsanguinating him.
“No,” he said. “What I think about is how do you stand it when you care about something so much and you can’t make it better. I mean, what do you do?”
“What would you like to do?”
“Wave a magic wand and make it better.” He grinned. “That’s crazy, isn’t it?”
She smiled too. “Not crazy. Wouldn’t it be great if we could do that? But we can’t, and this seems to make you very unhappy. I’m wondering how I can help you.”
“I don’t need help. I’m fine. Just let me go home and I promise, no more radio program.”
“Fair enough. How about we call your roommate, so you’re not alone tonight?”
“I have a single.” He twirled a long strand of curl around his finger. He needed a haircut, one of the many things he’d let slide this semester.
/> “What about your parents?”
Right, Jeremy thought. Calling Francie and Tian at 3:00 a.m. would make a bewildering situation so much worse. His mom would be at work, in the middle of her night shift on the medical center switchboard. His dad would be wandering the four-room flat, snapping rubber bands against his wrist and unable to fall asleep until Francie got home. No way Tian would be able to keep his cool with Health Services, with any bureaucracy.
So he lied. “They live in Springfield, but I can’t reach them. They’re in Europe.”
“I’d feel better knowing you’re with a family member. Grandparent? Brother or sister?”
He shook his head.
“How about a girlfriend, a buddy?”
There was no one. Not even a cat. He was pathetic. Especially when you think what a big and glorious family he had before his dad went to prison and their commune fell apart.
“There’s my twin brother,” he said. “But he lives four hours away.”
He and Tim Skyped every Sunday. Jeremy always felt better watching the image of Tim’s dumbo ears sticking out from the tight blond curls they both inherited from their parents’ racial mix, except that Tim was a business major and cut his hair so short the curls were irrelevant. The warm twin feeling rarely lasted through the week. Besides, Tim had moved to Brooklyn to get away from them all. The thought of Patty calling his brother made Jeremy’s chest feel squirrelly with shame. Tim already thought he was a loser.
“Do I have your permission to talk to your brother?” she asked. “I don’t think you should be alone right now. And I think you could benefit from talking to someone, a counselor. Perhaps even some medication. May I give you a referral?”
Jeremy stood up. “No, no, and no,” he said. “Thanks for everything, but I’m fine. I just want to go back to my dorm. I have a lot of stuff to do.”
“What is more important than taking care of yourself?” Patty asked.
“Our planet is dying, a holocaust of plant species. Isn’t that pretty important?”
Patty nodded. “Yes, it is. But right now, I think that your mental health has to take priority over politics.”
“You don’t get it,” Jeremy said. “This isn’t political. I’m just sad about the plants.”
“I think I understand how strongly you feel about the plants and I’m concerned that you’re so upset tonight. I’d really like to contact your brother.” She handed him a clipboard with a release form, and then a business card. “You can call me any time, if you need to talk.”
Jeremy sighed. “Okay, okay. Call Tim. But he won’t be able to come. And it’s no big deal. I just get upset sometimes.”
Patty was quiet for a few seconds, then spoke in a soft voice. “Is that why you’re crying?”
Jeremy touched his cheek and looked at the glistening wet on his finger.
When the phone rang, Tim was dreaming about the long-necked girl who sat in front of him in macroeconomics class. The phone display read 3:13 a.m., which meant it had to be bad news. Probably about his dad, whose transition from prison to home had been rough. His mom was chronically stressed trying to buy food and pay rent and two college tuitions and now deal with Tian too.
“Is this Timothy Beaujolais?” asked a woman’s voice.
“Yeah. Who’re you? What’s wrong?”
“My name is Patty Longwood. I’m a nurse practitioner at Health Services at UMass. Your brother Jeremy was brought in this evening. He’s emotionally distraught and I don’t think he should be alone.”
“Distraught? What’s wrong with him?”
“He became agitated during a radio broadcast.”
“The dead plants thing, right? Jeremy is totally obsessed with that shit.”
“Yes, he’s talking about extinct plants, but I wonder if there are other issues. He’s vague about whether or not he might hurt himself.” She paused. “Jeremy says your parents are out of the country and you’re his only other relative.”
Out of the country? Their parents might be out of touch, but as far as Tim knew they were in their second floor apartment on Sumner Avenue. Francie was likely at work, but he doubted that Tian had left the apartment in three weeks except to check in with his parole officer.
And no way was Jeremy suicidal. A little too sensitive, that’s what their mom always said. Jeremy was two minutes older but Tim was the practical one. Jeremy’s problem was that stupid radio program. One night when Tim was home for winter break, Jeremy dragged him down to the station. Reading those long Latin names, Jeremy acted like he was transported to a scene of carnage someplace far away, like Rwanda or Syria or Tiananmen Square.
“So, can you come get him?” the nurse practitioner asked. “He shouldn’t be alone.”
“You mean tonight? I’m in Brooklyn. I have classes tomorrow,” Tim said. “There’s no train until morning.”
The nurse practitioner’s sigh slid into silence. Tim tried to banish the mental image of Jeremy in the locked ward of some hospital, medicated up the wazoo, rocking back and forth and wondering why Tim broke their pledge.
They made the pledge the summer they were ten, the first time Francie took them to visit their dad in prison. Sitting in the family visiting room, Tian had been so remote he could have been carved of ebony, and tears wandered down Francie’s cheeks to darken her T-shirt. The twins sat close together at the scarred visiting room table, whispering about X-Men characters until Francie told them to cut it out, didn’t they want to talk with their dad?
By then, most members of the commune had deserted the big house on Pioneer Street. In the back seat of the old van driving home to Springfield from the prison, Jeremy and he promised each other that no matter how weird their parents were, no matter what the other adults in the commune did, the two of them would always be strong for each other. No matter what.
“Okay,” he told the nurse practitioner. “I’ll catch the morning train.”
Chapter Two
This could be called a tale of two families, two oddly configured groupings of quasi-kin still living in the old city neighborhood bordering Forest Park, in the shadow of the life-altering events that bound them together eleven years earlier. After all they went through, you might think that the two families would have stayed close, but it didn’t work out that way. Every once in a while they would catch a glimpse of each other at the farmers market at the X, but they fingered the kale or sniffed the cantaloupe and pretended not to notice.
Jeremy and Tim were nine when their world imploded. After the deaths and the trial, their father went to prison and their mother had to move them from their big house on Pioneer Street to a small apartment on Sumner. The other commune members scattered except for Pippa and Jeremy’s mom pretty much blamed Pippa for the whole mess. She said that Pippa crossed over to the other side when she took her baby and moved in with Zoe’s family, the other family. Jeremy imagined a wide river with rapids raging between the two homes, instead of four lanes of traffic on Sumner Avenue.
Zoe was five when her parents and cousin got involved with the twins’ commune and the wrong end of the law. Now, at sixteen, she didn’t remember much about the upheavals, but she knew the bones of the story and occasionally wondered about it.
“Get on with your lives.” That’s what all the adults told them and that’s what the children tried to do.
Zoe followed her grandmother’s patchwork jacket down the frozen food aisle, which didn’t take long because Flo scorned processed food of all varieties.
“You know they freeze out all the vitamins,” Flo said every single week. “And canned is no better. Veggies got to be fresh. You remember that.” Flo pointed her cane at Zoe to emphasize her point. Then she jabbed it at the golden mane of a lion on the cardboard cover of a frozen dinner, something about king-of-the-jungle sized portions.
“Lions’ noses darken as they age,” Flo said. “Like old people turning gray.”
That didn’t quite follow, but Zoe nodded, glancing at Flo’s hair, fly-a
way wild and iron-gray. “Not silver,” Flo liked to say. “It’s the color of steel and just as strong.” Flo liked to watch nature shows and often shared random snippets of information like changes in elderly lions’ noses. Interesting, even if not always relevant to the conversation. Flo was smart and funny and blunt, and if her outspoken opinions sometimes got her in trouble, well, then Zoe knew where her own big mouth came from. When her dad offered her an after-school job to help her grandmother, she jumped at the chance to earn some money. “It might not be all fun and games,” Sam had warned. “Ma can be a … handful.”
Three days a week, Zoe took the city bus from the high school to Flo’s apartment. Mondays she did Flo’s laundry, laying out matching outfits on the dresser top, labeled with post-it notes for the day of the week, and made sure Flo got to the Y for yoga. After practice on Fridays, she met Flo and Sam for an early dinner, then helped Flo vacuum the apartment.
Wednesdays she took Flo grocery shopping. Or, Flo took her, Zoe thought as she steered her wheelchair behind her grandmother’s cart in her never-varying path through the store. The demented leading the disabled—that was how Zoe liked to describe grocery shopping with Flo to her friends. The produce section was always last, so Flo’s fruits and veggies didn’t get squished. That’s where they spent most of their time, Flo squeezing avocados for perfect ripeness.
That Wednesday was no different. The avocados were all either petrified or mush and Flo abandoned them, glaring at the woman restocking the produce shelves. Moving on to the lettuce, Flo held a bunch of red leaf in each hand, examining them for who-knows-what and comparing who-cares-what. Chill, Zoe told herself, wondering what her best friend Xander was doing at that moment. They’d been tight since kindergarten when the teacher assigned seats alphabetically by first name, and the two of them shared the back table with Vanessa, while Ashley and Brianna and Dylan got all the attention. Xander was at the library working on their group project for civics class and she wished she were there too.
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