At her front door, she jiggled the doorknob and stared at the lock.
Locks required keys. Locks and keys and combinations and numbers meandered around her brain, circling and spiraling and refusing to line up right. The numbers stashed in her shoe weren’t the right answer, but nothing else came to her. She could hear the phone ringing on the other side of the door. Probably Sam, checking up on her. Now he’d be bound to lecture her again about carrying a cell phone, just in case of emergencies, along with nagging about giving up the bike. She liked her landline. She loved her bike. Where was her bike anyway? It must be inside the apartment. She had to make sure and she had to pee.
She turned the doorknob again, hard, but it stubbornly refused to open. Charlie meowed on the other side of the door. Closing her eyes, she leaned her forehead against the door and gave in to the images swirling in her head: the heavy iron keys she found in her father’s desk after he died. Leaning a different bike against the wire fence at Glen Echo to join Charlie—the human Charlie, not the cat—on the picket line. He wore a deep red dashiki. She carried a plastic-covered bike chain with the combination padlock and the string of numbers and voilá, she had it. She tugged on the leather cord around her neck and grasped the key. Yes!
Sometimes it took a while, but her brain didn’t let her down.
Sam couldn’t help himself. He left another phone message. “Ma, it’s me. Could you please call me when you get home?”
Flo hated it if he hovered too much, but she infuriated him with her stubbornness. If only she’d give up that damn bike, at least stop riding at night. Flo made her thoughts on that subject abundantly clear: “Butt out, buddy,” she’d said more than once. For the thousandth time, he wished that he had a sister to share his anxiety, or that his father were still alive. Not that Brad had been much good with emotions, and not that the man ever won an argument with Flo, but he might at least be an ally in the worry department.
It was bad enough having a teenager to fret over. Sometimes he thought that Anna got the easy part, living with Zoe for her first twelve years. He had been deliriously happy when Zoe moved upstairs into his half of the house, had eagerly built a ramp and wheelchair lift. But now he was the parent on the front lines of the potential major adolescent battles: cars and boys and drugs.
He shouldn’t have to worry about his mother every night too, listening for the phone until their ritual evening call, picturing Flo wandering off somewhere on that clunker of a bike and forgetting how to get home or neglecting to look for cars. He’d been thinking recently of attaching a small GPS transmitter to her bike. He would do it too, if he could be certain that she wouldn’t find it and get on her high horse about invasion of privacy or something. A tracker might be a drastic measure, but since the lunch with Zoe two weeks ago when he mentioned Assisted Living, Flo was barely speaking to him. She refused to talk about the place he found, refused to visit to check it out, wouldn’t even discuss the subject in general terms.
The whir of the wheelchair lift announced Zoe’s arrival home.
“How was study group?” he asked.
“Okay. Our project is cool.”
“The immigration thing?”
“That’s the one,” Zoe said. “We mostly agree on national policy, including college admissions and steps to citizenship. We had a good time. Except for Xander. He’s being a jerk.”
“A jerk how?” Sam pictured the boy hitting on Zoe, even though they’d been friends since kindergarten days of painted macaroni necklaces and Cookie Monster lunchboxes.
“About immigration reform. He wants to send all the undocumented workers back to wherever. Like that’s worked so far.” Zoe swiveled away and headed down the hallway toward her bedroom.
“Goodnight,” Sam called after her.
Zoe had her grandmother’s liveliness. Maybe the girl also inherited Flo’s attitude about changing the world. Sam wondered what a twenty-first century Stalinist would believe and shuddered at the possibilities.
He checked his watch. Only 9:30, not too awful. Flo would no doubt get home soon and call. In the meantime he couldn’t stop thinking about her stubbornness, trying to come up with a strategy to change her set-in-concrete mind. Maybe Mimi could help. She and Flo had been friends forever. Last month when Flo tried to take a bus to the mall, she ended up in Agawam and called Mimi. Mimi was stuck in the dentist’s waiting room and sent Sam to the rescue. Mimi must have noticed Flo’s decline. He touched the phone screen and listened to the dialing beeps. Would Mimi feel disloyal talking to him? Probably, but it was worth a try.
Mimi did sound uncomfortable when he explained his purpose. “I don’t know about this,” she said. “Your mother is my best friend.”
“I know,” he said, “and I hate putting you in an awkward position, but I’m really worried about her. Have you noticed her, um, odd behavior recently?”
“She’s more forgetful,” Mimi said, “but so am I. It goes with the territory.”
“Yeah.” Flo would kill him for this. “I guess maybe she hasn’t told you that she has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s?”
Mimi didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she sighed, loud enough to create a breeze in Sam’s ear. “She didn’t mention it. But she wouldn’t.”
“I don’t think she remembers the doctor telling her. When I reminded her, when I tried to talk to her about moving into Assisted Living, she looked at me like I was hallucinating.”
Mimi sighed again. “The thing is, your mother has always been such an outrageous person that it’s hard to know what’s her normal quirkiness and what’s something worse. Her mind works in odd ways. A few weeks ago she announced that she had given names to the three bridges in her mouth: the South End, Memorial, and the North End.”
Sam laughed. Those were Springfield’s bridges over the Connecticut River. That was just Flo’s eccentric brain at work, not dementia. “Naming the dental work—that’s Ma all right. But other things, like getting lost all the time and some belligerent behavior, that’s what got her banned from Food Castle.” He paused. “I’m afraid she’s not safe living alone any more.”
“I can’t conspire against Flo. What are you asking me to do?”
“I’m not sure. Talk with her, maybe. Come with us to visit this place I found?”
“I can do that if Flo agrees,” Mimi said. “And Sam? I’m so sorry.”
From her bedroom, Zoe eavesdropped on her dad’s side of the conversation. He had been pretty distracted since the Food Castle debacle. Zoe couldn’t imagine her grandmother in a nursing home, or whatever new kind of place Sam was talking about. Flo would rather ride her clumsy old bike down Sumner Avenue off into the sunset.
Zoe transferred onto her bed and dumped the contents of her chair-pack. Fifteen minutes writing up the changes in their civics project and then she could put on her headphones and relax.
Her cell phone buzzed and Gabe’s photo flashed on the screen. The kid lived downstairs; why was he calling her instead of talking in person?
“Hey, Gabe.”
“Hey. Listen. I’m gonna have a birthday party here, Saturday after next. Dancing, you know, boy-girl and everything? My parents and your mom say they’ll butt out if you and the twins are here to be, like, you know?”
“Chaperones?” How weird was that, being considered mature enough to be a chaperone. Except that some people didn’t think a girl in a wheelchair could get into much trouble. She’d do anything for the opportunity to prove them wrong. Like tonight, working on their immigration project, she kept looking at Xander’s scowling profile and wondering what it would be like to touch the fine brown hairs sprouting on his upper lip.
“Yeah, chaperones. Will you?”
“Boy-girl, huh? Is there a girl you like?” Zoe teased.
“Not really. Will you do it?”
“Did Tim and Jeremy agree?”
“I haven’t heard back from them yet,” he said.
“Well, if they say yes, I’m in too.”
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Chapter Eight
The next afternoon, Jeremy hesitated at the door of Sari’s apartment. He considered turning back. He really wanted to see Mary again, but he had no connection with those other people. He could leave right now and nobody would know and no one would care. They only invited him because of Tim.
Footsteps in the hallway behind him scuttled that plan.
“Hey, Jerry,” Carl said.
“It’s Jeremy.”
Carl’s laugh was high-pitched, almost feral. “I think of you guys as Tom and Jerry. Like the cartoon.”
“Well, I’m Jeremy. And my brother’s name is Tim, not Tom.”
“Whatever,” Carl said. “You know, it’s hard to figure you guys as twins. You look alike but otherwise you’re like, opposites. Like cat and mouse.” He laughed again and grabbed the doorknob.
Now Jeremy wanted to leave even more. There’d been a boy like Carl, all jokey and full of himself, on their block at home. A kid who read every newspaper article—about Abby and Terrance, about the trial and Tian going to prison—and made sure that everyone in school knew every detail. Tim ignored it all, just played sports until he fell exhausted into bed every night. Jeremy didn’t much like sports. He drew pictures, of plants and flowers mostly, and look where that got him.
Instead of opening the door, Carl turned back to Jeremy with a sly expression.
“What?” Jeremy asked.
“I saw how you looked at Mary. You know, she’s got a kid and that’s all the family she wants. Just saying.” Without bothering to knock, Carl pushed inside the apartment and let the door shut behind him.
Jeremy leaned against the corridor wall, feeling his cheeks flame. Had he been that obvious? Now was definitely the time to leave, before anyone else arrived for the meeting. Carl stuck his head back into the hallway. “You coming or what?”
Sari, Mary, and two other women sat in the living room and three guys walked in right after them. Jeremy added his jacket to the pile on the floor and took a seat slightly outside the circle, where he could watch Mary but as far away from Carl as possible. The pink-haired senior from the other night sat to his left. Pink wasn’t a very sustainable color, was it? Maybe she regretted it, because she’d jammed an old brown felt hat low over her hair. She turned and introduced herself as Greenhope. Was that a name? What parents would call their baby something like that? She must have named herself.
“I’m Jeremy,” he said.
“Are you a student?”
“Not here,” he said. “At UMass. You?”
“My last semester.”
Sari brought a teapot and cups to the table and general conversation morphed into a discussion about Earth Day and he realized the meeting had begun. Jeremy mostly watched Mary. Today she wore jeans and a sweater rather than her elementary ed outfit. She listened intently as people proposed teach-ins and sit-ins and take-overs. Greenhope suggested picketing the Park Slope home of an oil company CEO. Carl shook his head. “That won’t do anything except make his neighbors feel sorry for the bastard.” He started to talk about the evil of SUVs and how easy they were to target, but Sari touched his shoulder and he stopped.
Jeremy slouched in his seat. He didn’t belong in this room. These people called themselves Green Warriors and believed in civil disobedience. He just cared about the plants. Still, when Mary passed around a dog-eared paperback book, he thumbed through it.
“If you haven’t read it,” Greenhope said to him, “you really should. The author explains it all. Everything fits together and make sense.”
“We call it the Big Green Book.” Carl laughed. His hyena snort was starting to really annoy Jeremy.
Mary must have noticed Jeremy’s blank expression. “Like Mao’s little red book,” she said quietly. Jeremy nodded. Her glow was less intense than the night before, but he could only take his eyes away from her face for a few moments at a time, to look at other people or at the piles of books and magazines leaning against the apartment walls. When she spoke, he knew that her sentences were simply words lined up in order, but he savored every word. He wondered about her son, about her life. Then she announced to the group that she was returning to Oregon the next morning and after that it was hard to listen to anything else.
“Whatever actions you folks decide on for Earth Day,” she said, “it’s important to collaborate with environmental groups in the community, not only at the college. I think your actions should accomplish two goals: to make people feel deeply connected to the movement, and to move them forward in their commitment to stop the corporate rape of our planet.”
“We need to recruit people, too,” Greenhope added. “For the different levels of activism. Like they say in the Green Book.”
Mary looked directly at Jeremy. “As someone who is new to this group, I hope you’ll help plan the Earth Day programs. Sometimes we old-timers just talk to each other, forget to reach out to potential new allies.”
Sari opened her arms to the group. “Let’s not forget what Mary said last night. We are all family; we’ve got to work together. Climate change is killing our planet and our kinfolk.”
An older guy spoke up then. “It’s not that simple. Some of us from the community aren’t satisfied with teach-ins and administration building take-overs. The problem is bigger than that and requires more aggressive tactics.”
Carl nodded. “We want to save our planet, not take over the university.”
On the train home, Jeremy tried to decide if he was disappointed or relieved that Mary was leaving. Relieved, mostly. And what was up with Greenhope? At the end of the meeting, she pulled him aside and said she was available if he wanted to talk about the Green Book. He promised to read it before the Earth Day committee meeting next week, so he stopped at the bookstore on the ground floor of Tim’s apartment and bought a copy. “The bible of the deep green ecology resistance movement,” claimed the blurb on the front cover. “A concrete blueprint to stop corporate destruction and save our planet.”
Save the planet. Save the plants. Those words mattered. Jeremy took the stairs to Tim’s apartment two at a time. Maybe this book was what he was looking for.
Upstairs he paced, too wired to sit down right away. He wandered down the hall and dumped his backpack on his bed, wondering for the umpteenth time why Tim assigned him the larger bedroom, the big room with two windows and a cross-breeze. Tim always kept his bedroom door closed and Jeremy had never been inside, not once in the weeks he’d been staying with Tim. He hesitated for a minute before turning the doorknob.
His brother’s room was small and stuffy, with a single smudged window facing a trash-littered alley. An ordinary room with a twin bed covered with an Indian print bedspread, desk piled with laptop and textbooks, dust bunnies scooting across the floor. Ordinary except for the posters.
They were the same posters taped on the walls of their childhood room on Pioneer Street, then moved to the small Sumner Avenue apartment after Tian went to prison. They weren’t the exact same ones—Jeremy could tell because there was no rip across Wolverine’s left leg repaired with tape—but Tim must have bought new copies and replicated their bedroom gallery of X-Men characters and glory.
It was unsettling, seeing the posters here, and they transported Jeremy a decade back in time to the years he and Tim were nine and ten. Their dad was on trial and then sent away, leaving their mom to cope with the verdict and the move and their failing tea room business. Francie worked night shift on the hospital switchboard and Jeremy and Tim watched movies, preferably X-Men but anything with superheroes would do. Two or three times a week they stopped at the video store on the way home from school, their backpacks bulging with tapes, and spent their allowance on movie posters—when the owner of the store wouldn’t give up the old or tattered ones—taping them to the wall of their shared bedroom.
They idolized Wolverine and his image ruled the gallery of posters on the walls. Jeremy’s favorite, the one with the ripped leg, hung at the foot of his bed, placed so
that he saw it first thing every morning. Bad things had happened to Wolverine too. He’d been hurt and abandoned and didn’t know exactly what happened. Wolverine was a mutant, all alone in the world, but he didn’t sit around feeling sorry for himself. At least Jeremy had a twin and he knew what hit him, though he never completely understood why. Tim and he collected every poster, every T-shirt, every magazine photo they could find. They bickered over who got to be Wolverine when they played X-Men, and who had to be Cyclops.
If Wolverine could survive the pain, then Jeremy figured he could push through too. If only the school for mutants were real. Of course, being a half-black commune brat with a dad in prison was nothing compared to having blades for hands or turning friends to ice with your touch or creating storms with your brain. Jeremy liked to imagine twin superpowers for Tim and him to balance the bad stuff. Tim said their situation didn’t bother him; he didn’t need any mutant assistance. Even so, their whispered super-power fantasies filled many hours when their mom was at work.
Looking at the posters on the bedroom wall, clearly Tim was affected more than he claimed. Tim had re-created their childhood refuge. Except that this room had a door, a privacy strictly forbidden in the commune. Jeremy closed the door behind him, stretched out on his bed and opened the Big Green Book.
“Reading in the dark?” Tim asked from the doorway. He switched on the overhead light and studied his brother, hunched over a thick tome. Jeremy had always been odd. Their childhood pledge was important, but having Jeremy stay with him wasn’t helping; his brother was growing weirder instead of getting his act together. “What’s the book?”
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