Kinship of Clover

by Ellen Meeropol

  Zoe took Jeremy’s hand and squeezed, hoping her grandma wasn’t going to get too weird with the guy and scare him off. Flo could be pretty intense. But then, maybe Flo and Jeremy had that in common.

  “About what you asked me, before. Whatever action you take—gathering petitions or bombing the stock exchange—make sure that when the smoke clears and the rulers are still in power, you can live with what you did.”

  Whoa, Zoe thought. Where did that come from? Did her grandma do something she couldn’t live with? She glanced at Jeremy but couldn’t read his face.

  Flo pushed her finger into Jeremy’s chest. “What I mean is, you’ve got to make a life that does good work and still gives you room for, you know, for love.” She patted Zoe’s cheek.

  “Now go home,” Flo said. “I’m tired.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Jeremy thought about Flo’s words all week. While he was pulling weeds at the garden, he wondered what Flo did that she couldn’t live with. Or maybe what she regretted not doing? Catching up on missed assignments in the botany lab, he thought about Mary. He hadn’t been able to find anything on the Internet about her arrest. Did she really blow something up? Alone in his dorm room in the evenings, he wondered how Flo was doing with the new medicine. Zoe didn’t seem to know, or didn’t want to talk about it during their nightly phone conversations. Mostly she made plans for his weekend visit.

  Friday afternoon he took the bus to Springfield and joined Sam and Zoe for lasagna.

  “This is great.” Jeremy wrapped an escaping tendril of mozzarella around his finger and licked it off. “How’d you learn to cook like this?” he asked Sam.

  Sam and Zoe looked at each other and laughed.

  “It was one of the conditions before my mom let me move upstairs,” Zoe said. She wagged her fork at Sam. “Dad had to demonstrate his ability to cook five healthy meals. Nothing store-bought or microwaved.”

  “Five?”

  “Yeah, Mom cooks for us on Sunday and she agreed we could eat out once a week.”

  Jeremy laughed. “Your mother isn’t, um, a control freak or anything.”

  “She just wanted to be sure Zoe would be well taken care of,” Sam said. “In hindsight, I’m glad she did it.”

  Jeremy touched Zoe’s hand, the one holding the fork. “So I’m curious. What were the five meals?”

  Zoe shrugged. “Who remembers? That was like four years ago and we both cook now. I made this salad and everything’s fresh from the farmers market.”

  Sam leaned closer to Jeremy and mock-whispered, “Some of us prefer a burger.”

  “Some of us aren’t very smart.” Zoe passed the salad bowl to Jeremy.

  “Better eat your greens,” Sam told Jeremy. “She’s tough, just like her grandmother. Sure you want to hang out with such a bossy broad?”

  “Dad!”

  Sam laughed. “Sorry. So, how’s it going making up the work you missed?”

  “Okay I guess. It’ll take me most of the summer though. Especially with the hours I’m spending at the permaculture garden.” Jeremy put down his fork and leaned forward. “I’ve gone three times and really like it. Alice—she’s the manager—invited me to come to the garden committee on Wednesday. She said they might hire me this summer.”

  “Oh,” Zoe said.

  Something in her voice grabbed Jeremy’s attention. She wasn’t happy. “What?”

  “It’s just that, you know, I was hoping you’d be in Springfield for the summer.”

  “I can’t breathe in my parents’ apartment,” he said. “But I’ll come home every weekend.” He looked at Sam. “And maybe your dad would let you visit me on campus some weekend?”

  Sam looked down. Zoe made a face.

  Okay, maybe not. “Um,” Jeremy said. “So how’s Flo doing with the new medicine?”

  Neither Sam nor Zoe answered right away, then they both spoke at once.

  “Too soon to tell,” Sam said. “It’s only been a week.”

  “She’s sleepy all the time,” Zoe said. “Come on. You know that’s true. She’s like, not herself. A zombie.”

  Sam rubbed his eyes hard. “Lethargy is a common side effect. Sometimes it goes away.”

  “You haven’t been yourself all week either,” Zoe said. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing. I’m fine.”

  “Tell me, Papa.”

  Sam sighed. “Something Flo said threw me, that’s all. It’s nothing. Probably just the protein plaques and nerve cell tangles talking.”

  “What did she say?”

  “That Brad, the man I always thought was my father, wasn’t. That my biologic father was this guy named Charlie, who she met on a picket line in Maryland.”

  “Wow,” Zoe said. “Did you ask her for details?”

  “Of course, but you know how vague she can be. All she would add was that she was a coward. And that doesn’t make sense.”

  Jeremy nodded, not sure if he should say anything, or even be part of this discussion.

  “There’s more,” Sam said. “I got this guy’s full name from online articles about the picketing thing. I saw his picture.”

  “Do you look like him?” Zoe asked.

  “Hard to make out his features in those grainy old newspaper shots. But the photo did explain some things.” Sam held out his hand. He stared at it, turned it over so that his fingers pointed toward the ceiling, then let his arm rest on the table. “Charlie is black.”

  “Wow.” Zoe put her hand, two shades lighter, on his arm. “No wonder you always look tan. That’s huge. So did you Google the guy, your dad?”

  “My alleged dad,” Sam said. “He was easy enough to find. He was a UAW organizer in Detroit. I found an article about his retirement party, and photos of the guy with his wife and sons and grandchildren.”

  “Double wow,” Zoe said. “I wonder if Grandma knows where he is. I wonder what happened, you know? What went wrong.”

  “If it’s true.” Sam shrugged. “She could have made up the whole thing.”

  “I bet they had a wild romance and something tragic happened.”

  “We’ll probably never know. But you’re right about one thing. I haven’t been myself all week.”

  “Do you want to meet him?” Zoe asked.

  “Charlie? I don’t know. My brain is still reeling about Brad maybe not being my dad. And about my real father being black.”

  Jeremy cleared his throat. Maybe he should stay out of it, because it really wasn’t any of his business. But he really liked Zoe and her dad was pretty cool. He put his arm on the table, next to Sam’s. Their skin was almost the same hue.

  “My dad’s black too,” he said. “We’re half and half. What’s the big deal?”

  “It’s not the race, per se.” Sam spoke slowly. “It’s the surprise of it. And all of a sudden not being just one thing. Being two different things, opposite things.”

  “Black and white aren’t really opposites,” Zoe said. “Just different. She shrugged. “Don’t you think everyone holds contrasting things, opposites even, inside our skin?”

  Both men looked at her. Skeptically, she thought.

  “What,” she said. “You don’t think having spina bifida is like that? I am able-bodied and impaired, whole and broken. You think those aren’t opposites?”

  It took forever to shuffle to the bathroom because the carpet had sprouted prickly needles. Flo held onto the wall with her hand, her brain loop-de-looping like an amusement park ride. She was grateful for the safety bar next to the toilet and grabbed it, stopping to rest. She looked into the toilet bowl. Did she need to throw up or did she dream that? The memory of vomiting, or maybe just the thought, made the wooziness in her middle tumble harder and start to come up her throat. No, she refused to give in to it, or to the dizziness either. She sat on the toilet seat and put her head between her knees, like she used to when she was pregnant with Sam and it worked, just like it did back then.

  “Flo?” a voice called from the bedroo
m.

  It was Mimi’s voice. Flo smiled. She couldn’t think the last time she saw Mimi. “In here,” she called back.

  “You okay?”

  “Not really,” Flo said. What was she doing in the bathroom, anyway? Did she need to pee? She couldn’t remember, not with her head spinning like this, scrambling her thoughts.

  Mimi came in and helped her stand. That’s when Flo caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. That couldn’t be her face. That was an old lady covered with wrinkles and there was something very wrong about the wrinkles, besides being not hers. They were heavy, pulling her skin and flesh downward. Their weight was ripping her face off her bones like a demented rubber Halloween mask. Mimi murmured something and gripped her elbow more firmly and Flo looked away and they shuffled to the bedroom.

  Her gang of women friends were waiting for her. Their smiles were stiff, like when you don’t know whether to grin or wail. Flo was glad to see them, but really she’d just as soon wail. Why were they there? She’d known them for years, but did she really know them? Why were they staring at her like that? Was it the wrinkles and was her face now totally gone? Or maybe they weren’t really her friends, after all. Maybe they didn’t even like her. Maybe they had never loved her and now that she was weak they wanted to hurt her and take her things.

  “You okay now, Flo?” Mimi’s voice was soft but solid.

  She nodded. “I’m fine.”

  Well, maybe not quite fine, not right at that moment. But she was resilient and she’d be fine. Flo looked at her friends, from one to the other. Mimi stood next to her, holding her elbow. Claire and Marlene sat on her bed, Fanny on the reading chair by the window next to her book, splayed across the upholstered arm, open to the same page as a week ago. Why were they here?

  Mimi must have read her confusion. “Our new meeting schedule,” she said.

  Fanny smiled. “Saturday mornings, right here.”

  “The Girls’ Club,” Marlene added.

  “How’re you doing on the new medicine?” Claire asked.

  Flo let go of Mimi’s arm and put both hands on her chest. She wanted to scream. How do I look like I’m doing?

  But she couldn’t speak. Her words felt born in slow motion. Stillborn. Her tongue was thick and sluggish, her lips stupid. Was it the medicine making her so woozy or was this her now-brain? She stared at Claire, always trying to be the professional one, the nurse, the know-it-all. Claire was probably making mental notes right now about Flo’s cognitive deterioration. Decay. Rot. And there wasn’t a damn thing Flo could do about it. Come to think about it, Claire had always been like that. Assessing and evaluating. Always judging her. Well, Flo had had enough of that.

  Flo reached for the hand mirror on her chest of drawers. Her right hand wouldn’t move so she grabbed it with her left and pulled her arm back to throw. She managed to send the mirror wobbling toward Claire, handle over oval frame over handle over glass.

  Something was happening. She couldn’t figure it out. It was so odd. She heard her own breathing, raspy and much too fast. She could see her hands but couldn’t feel them and then it was her whole body and she swayed back and forth and her head went spinning out of the universe and then her legs melted and she lost her balance. The wooden bedpost reached up and smashed into her chest as she collapsed onto the floor.

  Saturday mornings were usually a productive work time for Sam, while Zoe slept late and hardly anyone called. Today he couldn’t concentrate on the website redesign for the pet supply store, couldn’t stop thinking about how weird his mom was acting on the new medicine, couldn’t stop wondering what was the true story of Brad and Charlie, couldn’t stop worrying about what Zoe and her boyfriend were doing in the living room until he finally heard the squeak of her wheelchair in the hallway at 2:00 a.m.

  Around and around his worries spun, but they kept circling back to Jeremy’s comment about his own father’s race. “What’s the big deal?” Jeremy had asked.

  It was a big deal but Sam couldn’t say exactly why. Sam wasn’t sure why it made him so uncomfortable. Was he a racist for not being pleased to learn this new fact about his paternity? He wondered—just for a brief moment—whether maybe this Charlie man had coerced Flo or swept her off her feet. But then he was immediately ashamed because that was wrong and he knew it. It was more than wrong. He knew better than to think things like that. Besides, Flo said she loved Charlie and her voice was tender when she said his name and that made him feel deeply sad for her.

  But mostly he was pissed off. How could his mom lie to him all these years about something as important as his father and as critical as his race? Did that mean she’d lied about other things, things he should know about and now probably never would? None of it made sense. If Flo loved the guy and got pregnant, and if Charlie didn’t want a kid, did she consider an abortion? It was still illegal back then, so it would have been hard to get. Scary. Risky. But not impossible, and his mother could do anything she set her mind to, back then.

  Abortion. That thought led down a familiar path of regret. It brought the rush of another shame that always came when he revisited the ultrasound showing the hole in Zoe’s spine. How he hadn’t wanted his daughter to be born and Anna insisted this baby would be wonderful and Anna won because it was her body and she was so certain. Anna had been right and he had been abysmally wrong. How empty his life would be without Zoe.

  He tried to shake the old Zoe remorse from his head and that brought him back to Flo. His mom had always seen disaster everywhere, and now it was worse than ever, and it must be genetic because apparently he was catching her downer disease.

  That’s what Sam was thinking when the phone rang.

  “Your mom had a fall,” Mimi said. “It’s bad. Meet us at the ER”

  On the short drive to the emergency room, Sam pictured one worst-case scenario after another. He tried to tamp down the terror that filled his chest, leaving little space for breathing. By the time he parked the car and made his way through the queues of worried family members and official red tape, Flo was settled on a stretcher surrounded by sea green curtains and connected by wires to a bank of monitors. It’s just the reflection of the curtain hue that makes her skin look so sick, he told himself. Mimi leaned on the pillow, eyes closed and mouth close to Flo’s ear.

  “I’m here, Ma,” Sam said.

  Flo didn’t stir. Mimi slipped her hand from Flo’s and stood up, pulling Sam outside the curtained area.

  “She hasn’t woken up yet.” Mimi took off her glasses and swiped the back of her hand across her eyes.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “I’m not sure. When the four of us got to her apartment today, Flo was acting strange. Loopy and agitated. Then she seemed to get angry at us, although I have no idea why. She threw a mirror at Claire, that’s when she fell. But it wasn’t exactly a fall—she seemed to collapse, slow motion. First her face fell and then her body and her arms and legs—she just crumpled. Anyway, she hit her chest as she fell and I yelled for help and the staff called 911 and here we are.”

  He covered his face with both hands. He’d been afraid of something like this. His mom had been so spacey on the new medicine. Why hadn’t he insisted they stop it? This was his fault.

  Mimi touched his arm. “It’s not your fault, Sam.”

  “What have they done so far?”

  “The nurse started the IV and did an EKG and a doctor examined her and called the cardiologist. Now we’re waiting.”

  “What did the doctor say?”

  “Something about heart failure. The EKG showed an arrhythmia.” Mimi hesitated. “And she’s severely dehydrated.”

  Sam closed his eyes. Damn that medicine. Damn his inaction.

  “Have you called your family?” Mimi asked. “Zoe?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “I will. Anna and Emily will bring Zoe. Emily can translate the medical jargon for us.”

  Mimi nodded. “I’ll stay if you want me to.”

  “Not nece
ssary. I’m fine,” Sam said. “I’ll call you when I know anything more.” He paused. “Thanks for everything. I’m really glad you were with her, when it happened.”

  After Mimi left, Sam dropped onto the metal chair. He took Flo’s hand. “I’m sorry, Ma. I shouldn’t have let them give you that medicine.”

  He closed his eyes. He wasn’t good at hospitals, even with all the practice Zoe’s condition had provided. Anyway, this was worlds away from the children’s hospital with its bright murals and larger-than-life animal statues and generally hopeful atmosphere. This was like when his dad died.

  Sam had been doing his geometry homework at the kitchen table, that same table now scorched and junked, when that phone call came. Flo was working in her home office and it was his job to answer the phone after school. His dad—well, Brad—had collapsed at work and was en route to the hospital. They met him here, at this hospital, maybe even this very same crowded cubicle with puke green curtains.

  That time it was Brad who was gray-faced and hooked up to the machines. Flo was in charge, insisting on better specialists and more morphine and a larger cubicle. Constantly at the nurses’ station, demanding that they hurry up the neurology consult or what was that new blip on the monitor and what did they mean her husband’s blood pressure and cholesterol were sky-high—his own doctor never said anything about that. His mother had been a force of nature back then. Sam let his head drop forward to rest on his mother’s pillow.

  “Hang in there, Ma,” he whispered. “I love you.”

  He didn’t tell her that often enough. She must know.

  After Brad died, it had been just the two of them, but sometimes Flo was more parent than Sam could take. He spent high school torn between admiring her largeness in the world and cringing from it. Take Career Day his senior year, when Flo’s presentation on the glorious independence of freelancing both embarrassed him and brought him some reflected glory. Flo hadn’t been satisfied to just describe her work doing audio narration for films and TV programs; no, she had to wax poetic about being a feminist and being her own boss and only working on material that contributed to positive change in the world. He could still picture her up there on the small stage in the high school auditorium, her face flushed with enthusiasm and her faded Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell T-shirt only partially obscured by the rainbow scarf she wore for special occasions. Where was that scarf? A victim of the fire, most likely. His friend Kenny, sitting next to him during the assembly, elbowed him as Flo left the stage to applause and a few catcalls and whispered, “Quite the pistol, your mom.”