Memory unit, Sam thought, remembering the doctor and his circular hallways. “The thing is, her condition will get worse.”
“But she’ll hate that. She won’t go. You can’t make her, can you?”
Sam’s face and arms sank onto the table. His hands covered his head so his words were muffled. “I don’t know.”
Zoe wanted to comfort her dad and she felt terrible about her grandmother. She hated asking for this, but she deserved a life too, didn’t she?
“Could we talk about this tomorrow? I invited Jeremy up, just for a little while. He has to go back to Brooklyn tomorrow. He’ll be here soon.”
“So you want me to get your grandmother out of the living room.”
She nodded.
He hesitated and for a moment she thought he would say no. “I guess. I made up the bed in my office for her.” Zoe felt his glance, sharp and worried, as if he was looking at someone he didn’t know.
While Sam picked up his sleeping mother wrapped in her smoke and her blankets and carried her to the futon in the small back bedroom he used as his office, Zoe opened the windows and waved her arms to disperse the burned smell. She folded the quilt over the back of the recliner, plumped up the throw pillows on the sofa, ran a damp paper towel over the coffee table. It wasn’t like she invited guys over every weekend so it was odd that her dad didn’t ask about Jeremy. Especially about Jeremy, a guy from the other family and someone she had never mentioned. The blush burned her neck and covered her cheeks. Sam must have been downstairs. Might have seen them dancing.
She heard the soft click of the study door closing, then footsteps in the hall and water running in the bathroom. She found a basket for the chips and emptied a jar of salsa into a bowl with a vine of flowers around the rim. She arranged them on the coffee table and rearranged them until the placement of basket and bowl and napkins and orange soda and cups looked perfectly casual. She bit her lips to make them puffy and red, leaned forward in her chair and ruffled her hair to make the curls bigger and more bountiful. Then she waited for Jeremy’s knock on the door.
Jeremy hesitated at the door, looking at the wheelchair lift. He could tiptoe back down the staircase, return to Brooklyn tomorrow, and pretend tonight never happened. He wasn’t sure what scared him most—Zoe’s disability, or simply the fact that she was a girl who seemed to like him and invited him over after a party, or the way her marzipan hair grew around his fingers and sent runners up his arm that burrowed into his skin.
The door opened. Zoe looked flushed and expectant. Pretty.
“I heard you on the stairs,” she said, wheeling back to let him enter.
The room smelled funny. Burnt. “You been cooking?” he asked, before thinking. Great. Now she’d think he was dissing her domestic skills or something. He was so not good at this.
Zoe laughed. “I’m a decent cook. My dad made all these changes to the kitchen so I’d have full access and everything. I had to learn so his money wasn’t wasted.” Her smile dissolved. “That smell is from my grandmother, her clothes and hair. There was a fire in her apartment tonight, while we were at the party.”
He followed Zoe into the living room and sat on the sofa. “That’s awful. What happened?”
“We don’t know yet.” She parked her chair and engaged the brakes. With a smooth motion, she vaulted onto the sofa. “Soda?”
He nodded, accepted the glass. How could he get her to move closer, to play with the hair on his neck again? What could they talk about?
“Tell me more about the plants,” she said. “About endangered species?”
He leaned back. This he could talk about. “I’ve always been interested in plants. When I was a kid,” he started and then stopped. She probably knew about his crazy family because of her Aunt Emily. Amazing that she wasn’t totally scared off by his father and prison. “We had this greenhouse. I used to sit in there and draw the plants because they were so intricate, so perfectly imagined, all those spirals and coils and whorls.”
The greenhouse was where it happened the first time, the plants coming to him, during the end-of-life ceremony for Bast. Jeremy remembered leaning against the hard leg of the potting table and then the candles flickered and the green started moving and the branches and leaves and vines reached out to him, their sucker fingers circling his arms and moving over his back and his neck. How they became part of him and he knew they were family, just like the people around the funeral circle.
Zoe touched his arm. “You were telling me about the spirals and coils and whorls?”
“Yeah, I got totally caught up in how mathematically perfect plants are, how people have even written formulas that describe them.” He hesitated, remembering trying to explain it to the nurse practitioner and her blank look.
“I know what you mean,” Zoe said. “In math class we studied Fibonacci numbers, the patterns of the seeds on flower heads and the spirals on pine cones. So totally cool. But if it’s the drawing part you like so much, why didn’t you become an artist?”
“My dad—Tian—insisted that Tim and I choose practical majors, so we can support ourselves when we graduate. He said botany was better than art and I could still draw plants for a hobby.”
“What about the endangered part?” She offered him the basket of chips.
He looked at her face, familiar but still unknown. Could he talk to her about this? He never discussed his family, not even with Tim. But Zoe was different. She must know what happened, even if she was young at the time. He took a big breath. Yes.
“After my brother and sister—my half-siblings actually—died, and then our cat was killed, his head cut off, and then the trial and after that our commune fell apart too. You know about this all, right?”
Zoe nodded. “It so totally sucks.”
“We had to move out of the house and it was just Mom and Tim and me in this apartment and I just, I don’t know, couldn’t stop thinking about how fragile it all is.”
She took his hand. “What do you mean?”
No, he thought, can’t go there.
He switched gears. “With the commune gone there was no more homeschooling so I started school. I was excited to be in a regular classroom, with lots of kids. Problem was, most of them called me cult-boy or taunted me about my dad being in prison. I made a couple of friends, but their parents said no way, like my family’s trouble was contagious.”
“Did you blame your parents, for all that?”
What an odd question. He thought about it. “No, don’t think so. I mean, do you blame yours, for being born different?”
“Sure. Sometimes.” She laughed a little. “So how’d you deal with school?”
“A teacher saved me, when she offered extra credit to pick an endangered species and write a biology report on it.”
“What did you choose?”
His finger traced the leafy vine on the salsa bowl. “Thismia americana, a shy little plant from the Lake Michigan wetlands. It had a tiny white flower like a pearl. I chose it because it lacked chlorophyll and our teacher said plants all had chlorophyll and I liked that she was wrong. And because it was declared extinct the year I was born.”
“So did you think the pearl flower was reincarnated into you?” she teased, letting go of his hand.
What could he say to get her hand back?
He dipped a tortilla chip into the salsa. He didn’t actually think that, didn’t believe in reincarnation, but sometimes he did suspect that his DNA was missing something essential. Like chlorophyll if he’d been a plant, which might be preferable. Carrying the chip to his mouth, he splotched salsa onto his pants and they both laughed. This wasn’t hard. Zoe was so easy to talk to.
“Is she going to be okay?” he asked. “Your grandmother?”
“She’s okay from the fire. But she has Alzheimer’s. My dad wants her to move into a place for people with dementia. So she’ll get supervision and everything.”
“Over my dead body.” Flo said from the hallway.
&n
bsp; Flo had woken up in a strange room. Well, not totally strange because she recognized Sam’s office, where he ran his website design business. More like out of the ordinary because she didn’t usually sleep there and she smelled like a campfire. The other bizarre thing was her brain, which should have been groggy with smoke and trauma and her increasingly warped and twisted neurons, but instead it felt sharp, jazzed even. This disease didn’t play fair. Or maybe that oxygen in the ambulance juiced her brain cells.
Whatever the reason, she wasn’t going to let this lucid moment, this opportunity for clarity, however fleeting, pass her by. She should probably shower and get dressed, but she could do that when her hazy lazy brain returned. She stood up, wrapped a blanket around herself, and walked into the hallway. The most important thing to do now was talk to Sam and change his mind about Assisted Living. Oh, she knew she couldn’t avoid that genteel incarceration forever, but not today. Not yet.
And find out what happened to her sweet kitty.
Sam was asleep on top of his covers, his laptop open, but she heard voices in the living room. Zoe and someone she didn’t recognize, but maybe the smoke had affected her ears, pickled them or something. She peeked around the corner and saw Zoe on the sofa with an unfamiliar young man.
“… Alzheimer’s,” Zoe was saying. “My dad wants her to move into a place for people with dementia. So she’ll get supervision and everything.”
Flo stepped into the doorway. “Over my dead body,” she announced.
Well, that certainly startled Zoe and her young man. He stood up, in a gesture of respect, and Flo narrowed her eyes at him. Who did that any more? Was he a human anachronism, a figment of smoke inhalation?
“This is my friend Jeremy.” Zoe rested her hand on Jeremy’s arm, a gesture that made Flo think, Hmmmm. “He’s Gabe’s brother. Remember I told you about Gabe’s birthday party tonight? Jeremy, this is Flo, my grandmother.”
Flo did recall something about a party. It was somehow connected to Forest Park and those dead babies but she wasn’t about to admit the holes in her memory to a stranger—to anyone, if she could help it—so she just nodded.
“Do you want some soda?” Zoe asked. “Or tea?”
“Tea, please.” The caffeine would help keep her brain in gear until she had a chance to talk with Sam. When Zoe transferred into her wheelchair and pushed into the kitchen, Flo took her end of the sofa.
“Now, tell me who you are again,” she said to Jeremy.
“He’s an artist and a botanist and wants to save all the plants from becoming extinct,” Zoe called from the kitchen.
“Can’t the man talk for himself, you bossy child?” Flo yelled back, then started coughing.
“It’s okay,” Jeremy said. “I don’t mind.”
“Nonsense. What’s your shtick with the plants?”
He leaned forward. “Two hundred species go extinct every day.”
“More nonsense,” Flo said. “Where’d you get your numbers?”
“The United Nations, I think. I’m not sure. But I know it’s not a natural process. People are causing it. Industry and pollution.”
Balancing the brewing tea on a lap tray, Zoe pushed back into the living room. Flo could smell the cinnamon through the veil of smoke and smiled, because it was her favorite hard-to-find blend that Sam kept around for her visits. Such a good boy.
“So what are you doing about it?” Flo asked, putting the steaming mug on the coffee table. What an interesting young man Zoe chose—maybe the gene for political activism skipped a generation, like diabetes and retinitis pigmentosa. Sam had never seemed interested in politics, but maybe Zoe would carry on her struggles.
“Come on, Grandma. Don’t give him the third degree.”
“No, that’s okay,” Jeremy said. “I like talking about it. It helps me figure things out. I went to some meetings in Brooklyn with these environmental activists. They’re doing teach-ins and Earth Day programs and trying to educate people about global warming. But the plants in their apartments are dead from neglect.”
“Global warming, huh? How does that fit into class struggle?” Flo asked.
He looked confused. “I’m not sure. And I’m not sure about some of the people in the group. I’m worried they might be doing other stuff too.” His voice grew brittle. “I heard them talking about Molotov cocktails.”
“Then why are you going back?” Zoe asked.
He shrugged. “Next Saturday is Earth Day. I promised I’d be there.”
“With Molotov cocktails?” Zoe asked.
“Not me,” he said. “I’ll be careful.”
“Sometimes you have to fight dirty,” Flo said. What was wrong with these kids? Didn’t they understand how important the struggle was? “You think those oil companies play nice?”
“I know,” Jeremy said. “But if you do ugly things, even to make the world better, doesn’t that make you as bad as them?”
“You do what needs to be done.” Flo crossed her arms. “Sometimes you have to fight dirty.”
Zoe put her hand on Flo’s arm. “You already said that, Grandma.”
“I don’t know if I can do it, can break the law. Look what happened to my family.” He glanced at Zoe. “And yours.”
“Some laws are wrong,” Flo said.
“So change the bad laws,” Zoe added.
Flo smiled. “It’s not that easy, sweetheart. Some things are urgent.”
“Yeah, like dying plants,” Jeremy said. “But some of the things the Brooklyn activists talk about are pretty intense. I mean, if you do stuff like that, how can you live with yourself?”
“You mean like blowing things up?” Zoe asked.
He nodded.
“You’d be surprised what you can live with,” Flo said.
She felt tired, so tired. Young people didn’t have the fire, the passion, of her generation. How would they ever make the sacrifices needed to change the world? You couldn’t get away from the dirty underside of political work. The tactical arguments that turned personal, the nights spent in filthy jails, betrayals by people who turned out to not be on your side after all. But she wouldn’t trade it for anything. Even after the Washington chapter kicked her out before Sam was born, she still considered herself a communist and spent interminable evenings in troublesome gatherings of like-minded people. “You can put up with a lot if you’re doing the right thing.”
“But I’m not sure what is the right thing,” Jeremy said.
Back then, she’d been pretty sure about that: organizing people against racism, against bosses and their wars.
“Some people in the Brooklyn group think the basic problem is how society is organized,” Jeremy continued. “But when I consider it from the point of view of the plants and the planet, human civilization itself is the problem.”
Flo frowned. From the point of view of the plants? Maybe this guy was off his rocker. Or maybe not. When was the last time she asked a plant what it thought? She knew what she should say; that whatever his question, the right answer was with the working class. But the tea wasn’t helping and she felt her mental sharpness fading away into fog.
Jeremy leaned closer. “And another thing. How do you stay true to the people you care about?” he asked in a small voice. “While you’re trying to change the world?”
Flo closed her eyes. She had asked Charlie that same question once, a lifetime ago, when he told her to go to college and get the skills to organize the workers. “But what about us?” she asked him and he answered something very smart—he always had the right response ready—but she couldn’t remember what it was.
Her thoughts and her sentences were starting to slip-slide away. So much for the effect of oxygen on brain cells. She felt herself tumbling down a steep hill of defeat, losing words as she fell. Using the arm of the sofa and the coffee table, she hoisted herself up.
“So tired,” she said. “Got to sleep.”
Sam woke to a burst of laughter from the living room. He stretched his ne
ck in a circle roll and closed his laptop. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep, not with Ma’s breathing not so good and Zoe alone in the living room with that boy. He’d better check on them all, but first he should call the fire station again, see if they’d learned anything. He both wanted to know the results of their investigation and was afraid to find out. Maybe it would be just the ammunition he needed, to convince his mother she couldn’t live alone.
Hanging up ten minutes later, he felt much worse. The firefighter’s report was preliminary, but it didn’t feel like ammunition. It felt inevitable and inescapable. The fire had started in the kitchen, probably on the stove and then the curtains. The apartment was uninhabitable, would need to be completely gutted. And the cat, Ma’s beloved Charlie-cat, was dead. Flo would be devastated, but maybe it would convince her of the seriousness of the situation.
Later, he would have a solemn talk with Flo. About Hillside Village.
The clock said 1:15 but there was no way he could sleep. Besides, maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to leave Zoe alone with Jeremy, not after the way they danced, the way the kid looked at his daughter. He had always trusted Zoe, had often gone to sleep when Xander and other friends were visiting, listening to music in the living room or working on school projects. Sam wasn’t proud of it, but he had felt protected by her medical condition. Sure, he hoped Zoe would find love and romance and everything, but her mother and all the books said it was likely to be later in life than regular people. Trust Zoe to ignore the experts and forge ahead.
The door to his office was slightly open and he could hear Flo’s raspy breathing. He tied his bathrobe belt and peered around the corner into the living room. Zoe sat on the sofa, facing Jeremy, her skinny legs crossed in the position her orthopedist recommended for good hip development. Was she wearing lipstick? And when did she start wearing tight sweaters?
Sam leaned against the wall and listened.
“Did you like the Oz books?” Zoe was asking. “Not just the Wizard, but the ones about Winkie Country and Glinda. And Ozma—she’s my favorite.”
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