by Ruth Ozeki
Geek shook his head. “It’s completely meaningless. Sterilization technologies are years away from commercialization. They’ll just quietly continue with the R&D, and when it’s ready to take to market, they’ll announce they’ve changed their minds again. Terminator will be back, I guarantee.”
Y finished reading the article. “Hey, it’s a start,” he said, handing it back. “Geek, man, you gotta snap out of it. I mean, you’re probably right and all, but the little victories count.”
Geek shut off the printer. “Not when you’ve lost the war, dude. It’s over.”
“What’s over?” Frankie asked.
“Nature.”
They were planning to leave after harvest. They were helping Will get the potatoes out of the ground, and he was paying them for their labor, after deducting the costs of his damaged crops.
“We said we’d pay you back for the potatoes we destroyed, and we will,” Geek told him. “But we’re not harvesting the NuLifes.”
“You were perfectly willing to harvest them awhile ago,” Will pointed out, but in the end he agreed.
They were pooling their wages to buy a used Winnebago, which they’d found in Idaho Falls. They would have to run it off fossil fuels until Geek had time to convert it to biodiesel, but the engine was solid. They were planning to drive it down to Frisco for the winter, after making a detour to Seattle, where there was a huge demonstration building.
“It’s gonna be massive,” Y told Frankie. “Global. The whole concept of the nation-state is an anachronistic fiction, a comforting smoke screen for the multinationals. The WTO is the throbbing heart of the new world order. It’s a new millennium, dude.”
They would make a stop in Eugene, Oregon, to rally and to organize.
“It’s a radical scene,” Lilith said. “You’ll totally dig it.”
They were in Will’s office before supper, waiting for Geek to finish inputting Will’s harvest data so they could use the computer to surf the Net. Tibet was lying on her back on the meeting table, watching Frankie play with her toes. Lilith was practicing mudras with her fingers, and Phoenix slouched next to her staring at a chart of potato diseases on the wall.
“You should come with us,” Lilith said to Phoenix.
Phoenix shoved his hands into his pockets and slumped deeper into his chair. “Yeah,” he said. “Pahoa’s lame. It’s, like, totally cut off from reality.”
Lilith held up her hand. “Pahoa’s cool, too. You just gotta choose your choice, you know? Go with the flow.”
Frankie snorted. “That’s a pile of hippified crap.” He let Tibet grab hold of his fingers and pulled her up by the arms. “Look at how strong she is! She’s gonna be a real fighter. Look at her punch. Pow, pow . . .” The baby was flailing her arms and legs. “You wanna come? Come,” he said to Phoenix. “We’re gonna kick some ass.”
Tibet started to fuss, so Frankie picked her up. He looked over at the kid, sitting there with a dark scowl on his face. “But you should tell your mom,” Frankie said, walking Tibet around the room.
“Huh?” Phoenix looked at him like he was nuts.
“Let her know you’re coming so she doesn’t worry,” Frankie said. Recently stuff like this was popping out of his mouth, and it surprised him, but it almost felt like the words were Charmey’s, and she would have said them if she were here, so he thought what the fuck, and let it happen.
Phoenix made a face. “No way, man. You got it all wrong. She doesn’t worry. She doesn’t give a shit about me. She’s totally whacked.”
“Gotta tell her anyway,” said Frankie, patting his daughter’s back. “I’ll bet she worries plenty.”
reap in joy
Harvest had been going full guns for several weeks, and once the Seeds had gotten the hang of it, they were doing eighteen-hour days alongside the Mexicans.
“It’s good for them,” Will told Cass in bed at night. “They need hard work and lots of it. We all do.”
Cass and Lilith took turns driving trucks, cooking for the crew, and taking care of Tibet. Every time they turned around, it was like they could see the empty place where Charmey should have been. The two women worked side by side, but they didn’t talk much. Cass sensed that Lilith resented her for taking Charmey to a hospital and for coaching her during the birth. That was to have been Lilith’s role, but Cass shuddered to think of the two girls going at it alone in the trailer.
As the harvest wound down, Cass always felt a sense of completion. The windrowers made their final pass through the fields and retired, and the trucks trundled the last of the potatoes into the clodhoppers. When the tubers were tumbled and sorted, spud from stone, and conveyored into the storage cellars, then they could all rest and overwinter. But this year felt different. There was no completion, only a tugging sense of loss. Charmey was gone. The Seeds would be leaving, and Yummy, too, taking all the life with them. Cass couldn’t bear to contemplate the winter.
On the last night of harvest they gathered in Cass’s small kitchen waiting for Will, who was paying off the last of the Mexicans. The Seeds were sitting around the kitchen table, and the table was set. Supper was mostly ready, but Cass was still fussing at the stove. She had been feeling anxious all day. She wanted to make them a nice meal to celebrate their hard work.
Frankie was cradling Tibet in the crook of his arm and feeding her from a bottle. Eyes squeezed shut, she was intent on her sucking, and Frankie was bending over, watching her. When Will walked through the door, Frankie sat up a little straighter. Will washed his hands, popped open a beer, and raised it.
“To a successful harvest,” he said.
Frankie cleared his throat. “Uh, before we do all that, can I say something?”
He sounded very nervous. Cass turned down the heat on her spaghetti sauce and wiped her hands on a dish towel. She glanced over at Will, who shrugged.
“Okay,” Frankie said. “So I just gotta tell you, this is what I decided. This is how I want it to be.”
He paused. No one spoke, although Lilith looked like she very much wanted to. Frankie looked around the group.
“Shit, this is hard,” he said, moving his shoulders up and down, like he was loosening up tight muscles. He took a deep breath and started again. “Okay. So this one time Charmey told me that you guys were trying to have a kid and it wasn’t going so good, so what I want to say is, like, that if it’s cool with you, I think you guys should take Tibet.”
It felt to Cass as if her heart had stopped beating. He was looking directly at her with his clear gray eyes like stones underwater. She stared back at him, speechless, then dropped her eyes and blushed. She couldn’t bear for him to see her face. She was so ashamed, because of course this idea was not new to her. How could it be? It was the single hope she had been struggling to overcome since the night of the explosion, when Frankie handed her the baby and ran out the door. She had despised herself for feeling it then, and she continued to feel sick with guilt every time she fed the baby or bathed her or sang her to sleep. Now, hearing it spoken out loud, she was horrified. He knew.
Lilith clearly felt likewise. “You can’t do that,” she cried, glaring at Cass. “You can’t just give Tibet away! Charmey would have hated that!”
Cass found herself nodding. She felt her hope start to die then, and it was a relief. She had worn it out at last.
“We can take care of her,” Lilith was saying. “We’ll be back on the road soon. We’ll parent her collectively.”
But Frankie shrugged. “I think Charmey would have wanted it this way.”
Lilith was furious. “I disagree. Besides, you can’t let her grow up here! This place sucks! I think we should decide this together. She’s our baby, too, you know. Charmey was our family, dude. You just showed up.”
Y stood and went to stand behind her. He put his hands on her shoulders. “He showed up at just the right time, Lil.”
Lilith looked around the table, appealing to Geek, who nodded. “It’s Frankie’s call. He’s her dad.”
“But he’s just a dumb-ass kid. He doesn’t know shit.”
“I know a kid needs a mom and a dad,” Frankie said. “And I know it sucks getting moved around from one place to another. Besides, Charmey liked it here. She liked living on a farm, and she really liked Cass a lot. She told me she trusted her because she’s old—I mean, like, she’s a grown-up and all.”
Lilith fell silent, and for a while all they could hear were the tiny sounds of Tibet, sucking. Cass was wringing the dish towel in her lap. She was afraid to speak, afraid that a wrong word might break the spell, and Frank would laugh and say he was just kidding. When nobody said anything more, he spoke again.
“Cool,” he said. “So that’s basically it. If you want her . . .”
Cass felt Will’s eyes on her. She bit her lip and nodded quickly.
“Yes,” Will said, but he sounded worried. “Of course. We want her, but—”
“Excellent,” Frank said. “Now, the only thing is, I want this to be legit. It can’t be a foster-care situation. I want you to adopt her and make it totally legal. Forever, you know?”
“Forever,” Will said. “Got it.”
Cass was barely breathing. She felt the blood pushing up into her face, and she was afraid she was going to cry. She couldn’t cry. She had to be a grown-up.
Frankie was clearly relieved and speaking freely now. “I want her to know me, too,” he was saying. “I’ll write to her and come see her, and I’ll tell her about Charmey so she knows about her birth mom. That part is important. My mom dumped me before I even knew who she was, and I don’t want Tibet to ever feel like that. But don’t get me wrong. She’s your kid. It’s just that she’s got this extra dad who loves her and a birth mom who died and everything but who loved her, too.”
“Of course,” Will said.
“Cool,” said Frankie. “Because I do totally love her, you know. It’s just that I’m only seventeen, and that’s way too young to be somebody’s full-time dad. Not by myself anyway. I’d blow it big time. Right, baby?”
Tibet had stopped suckling. Frankie shifted his position and eased the rubber nipple from her lips. He leaned over and blew softly into her face, and she waved her hand, batting him on the nose. He flipped a tea towel across his shoulder and held her up against his chest, then rubbed his hand in circles on her back. “So are we cool, then?” he asked, getting up and walking around the table.
“We’re cool,” Will said.
Frank stopped in front of Cass. “Hey, Tibet. Here’s your mom.” He turned the baby around and held her out.
Cass reached up and took her. For a moment she did not believe that the tiny body was still real, the insignificant weight, the slight bones, the doll-like legs and arms. But the baby’s heat was undeniable. Cass brought her to her chest and held her there, whereupon Tibet promptly burped up her dinner on the front of Cass’s sweatshirt.
“Well, that settles it,” Frankie said, tossing Cass the towel. “You’re official now.”
Cass wiped the thin, milky drool off Tibet’s chin. She looked into the baby’s face and took a deep breath.
“Oh, yeah,” Frankie said. “There’s one more thing I almost forgot. It’s about her food. I know it’s a pain in the ass, and it’s not like I care that much, but could you try to feed Tibet the organic stuff? Charmey would have wanted it that way.”
Cass looked up at Will. He nodded. “Sure.”
“Awesome,” Frankie said.
“Awesome,” Cass echoed.
waking up
My son rarely deigned to come home for meals during those last few weeks in Idaho. When he did appear, slouching through the door into the kitchen, he sat with his shoulders hunched to his ears and his elbows on the table, propping up his head like something badly taxidermied and left on a shelf. I wanted to breathe vitality and humidity back into him. As the temperature dropped in Liberty Falls, I babbled on about beaches, about surfing and warmth and rainbows and aloha, avoiding the tarnished glassy eyes that stared lifelessly at me. We’ll be going home soon, son. Everything will be fine in Pahoa.
Or so I believed, until he told me he was running away.
“What?”
“I’m staying,” he said. “I’m not going home.”
Of course, staying is not the same as running away, but this was just semantics.
“Here? In Liberty Falls?”
“No!” he said, with contempt that would have outdone mine at his age. “No, I’m going to Seattle with the Seeds.”
And while it doesn’t quite count when your runaway informs you beforehand, wasn’t it crueler this way? Wouldn’t it have been more considerate of him to slip off silently into the night? Like I’d done. I stared at him, my sullen boy, as he shape-shifted before my eyes. Time plays tricks on mothers. It teases you with breaks and brief caesuras, only to skip wildly forward, bringing breathtaking changes to your baby’s body. Only he wasn’t a baby anymore, and how often did I have to learn that? The lessons were painful. Like that time when I inhaled, expecting his sweet scent, and got the first fetid whiff of adult decay. He must have been six or seven, and how I grieved for his infant perfection! Soon after, I reached for him, still full of confidence and maternal entitlement, and I felt him stiffen and pull away.
Now time’s arrhythmia had tripped me again, catching me off guard and holding my breath. I stared at him, then exhaled. My heart beat like it would crack my rib cage.
“Thank you for telling me.”
He looked up at me, surprised. “You mean you’re going to let me go?”
NO! I wanted to scream, but I didn’t. “I don’t think I can stop you, can I?”
He shook his head. He waited.
So I kept talking. “Listen. I don’t want you to go. I want you to come home with me and Ocean and Poo. I think you’re too young to go off on your own.”
“I’m almost fifteen,” he said with exquisite condescension, causing me a small spasm of acute tachycardia.
I said, “Your wanting to leave, does it have to do with me or just with you?”
He thought about this for a moment. “Both.”
“Okay, well, the you part of it is up to you. I can’t do anything about that. But the me part—just hear me out, and you can think it over.” Now what? I had to think fast. “I’ve never been very good at doing the mom thing, and I’m sorry about that.”
Impatient now, he shook off my apology.
“I also know that I’ve been even less mommylike recently and I’m sorry about that, too. I know it’s been stressful for you. I’ve been preoccupied . . . no, what am I saying? Honestly, Phoenix, what with Grandpa and coming back here and all, I just lost it. But that’s over now. I’m on track. I promise.”
He was balancing on the rear legs of his chair and rocking to and fro, something every mother hates, but I refused to be distracted.
“How do I know that?” he asked.
“Well, you don’t. It’s one of those times where you just have to trust a person. And look at the history you have together.”
I watched his face for clues. “I’ve never let you down real bad, have I? I’ve always been there for you.”
He was guarded, but still listening. “Yeah,” he conceded. “I guess.”
I wished I could just stop there, but I couldn’t. So I continued. “About Elliot . . .”
His face darkened like he’d tasted something foul.
“That night, before he left, he asked me to marry him.”
The chair legs hit the floor with a thump. He braced his hands against the edge of the table.
“I told him no, Phoenix.”
He was looking from me to the door and back again, contemplating his options. His face was blank. “Really?”
“I just thought you should know.”
He kicked at the leg of the chair, taking time now to ponder the situation. “Are you sorry?”
I took a deep breath and tried to decide how to answer his question.
“I’m no
t sorry I said no.”
“Charmey didn’t deserve to die,” he said.
“No.”
“And he was responsible.”
“Perhaps. We don’t know.”
He jiggled his foot some more, and in that gap, while time unfolded and I waited, I was overwhelmed by what seemed to me like a miracle, in all its humdrum banality: There he was, my son, sitting in front of me contemplating fate and making decisions about his very own life. It brought tears to my eyes.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll think about it. I’ll let you know.”
“Thanks, son.”
He frowned at me, alert for irony, but I was not kidding around. The appellation had just slipped out. I was dead serious.
“I didn’t say I was coming with you,” he said. “I just said I’d think about it.”
I nodded. I didn’t trust myself to speak. Everything I wanted to tell him at that moment would just embarrass him, so I took it all outside, into the cold autumn night. Flushed with unspoken feelings, I craved the bite of frost on my skin. Mostly I felt overwhelmed with gratitude. How had this happened, that I had raised up a son into this world who could actually think about his decisions before he made them? No matter what Phoenix decided to do, I felt consoled knowing that while he might still break my heart, he wouldn’t do it carelessly. Ocean was another matter. She was my little pakiki-head, stubborn and wild, but I figured we still had a couple of good years before she started to reject me. If I tried real hard, maybe I could grow up a little more before then, so it wouldn’t hurt so much. Maybe, but I doubted it.
I cut across the garden. The greenhouse glowed like a large lantern, but tonight the luminosity seemed nervous, with a rhythmic flicker, like the flutter of an old film projector. As I approached, I saw it was the turning blades of the overhead fans, agitating the light and casting shadows on the drying racks of seeds below.
Geek’s silhouette moved against the glass, a hulking alchemist bending over his benches, practicing his arts. He had moved back into the greenhouse, and ever since the potato harvest ended, he’d been spending all his time trying to organize the last of Lloyd and Momoko’s seeds, getting them dried and processed, logged on to the Garden Web site, and packed for storage or distribution. Many seeds from the year’s crop had been lost. Momoko had done what she could, and everyone had helped, but there had just been too much disruption. The Potato Party, the lawsuits, the time spent in jail, the birth and deaths and the bombing of the Spudnik—all these had taken up too much time, and the seed crop had suffered. Some seeds had rotted. Others had succumbed to fungal infections and molds or had been damaged by heat. Bacterial cankers afflicted the tomatoes. Downy mildew spoiled the spinaches. Farming requires a kind of stability that is incompatible with revolution, but even knowing this, Geek worked alone after everyone had gone to bed, pulping and washing, winnowing and separating seed from chaff. Saving what he could.