by Cole, Olivia
Tasha looks around the room. The paint is fairly new, a cheerful sunshiny color whose full effect is muted by the drawn drapes. A bedside table on Z’s side bears a straight lamp with a green shade. The body of the lamp, with leaves growing out of its sides, was made to resemble a vine. Or a flower, she thinks, if the shade is seen as a blossom. Besides the bed and the table, the room contains a dresser and two doors, one leading to the hall and one opening to a closet. The dresser is crowded with picture frames. Tasha rises as softly as she can and pads over to it. She doesn’t remember taking her shoes off the night before, but they’re off.
The pictures are family photos. One is of Malakai, several years younger, wearing the tasseled uniform of the marching band, smiling a small smile like the one she has seen him offer to Ishmael. Ha, she thinks, I knew he was in the band.
Another is of Malakai, Ishmael, and another man, a year or two older than Ishmael. This must be Marcus. He looks more like Malakai than Ishmael, but with Ishmael’s straight back and wide shoulders. Those will come to Malakai when he’s a little older, she knows.
A third picture catches her eye, of Ishmael and a smallish, smiling woman. Her hair is soft and only a little gray. She wears a black suit. Not a Driver’s suit; just a suit. Her smile is Malakai’s, and Ishmael’s, and Marcus’s. Tasha wonders what it would be like, being a woman surrounded by sons who share her face.
“Hey, snoopy.”
Tasha almost drops the picture frame, which she’s been holding to get a closer look. She sets it down carefully and turns to Z, who is propped up on an elbow.
“Good morning to you too. You scared the shit out of me.”
“I do what I can.” Z cranes her neck. “What were you looking at?”
“Pictures of the guys and their mom.”
“Let me see.”
Tasha brings the frame with the three brothers together and the one with Ishmael and his mother.
“Oh, she’s so pretty,” Z says, studying the picture. “They all look so much alike. Especially Malakai and…what’s the older one’s name?”
“Marcus.”
“Marcus.”
She studies them a moment longer, then hands them back to Tasha, who returns them to the shelf.
“So what do you think?”
Tasha returns to the bed, leaning against the headboard.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I mean, we’re here. There’s so much I didn’t know.”
Z nods.
“People walking to California! It’s crazy. I mean, it would take forever. If I was them I’d take a scooter or two just in case. You know, maybe they could find a hook-up somewhere along the way.”
“Would you really want to ride a scooter across the country?” Tasha laughs. “Your ass would be so sore.”
“That’s true. But it’s either that or your feet.”
“Yeah.”
“Good thing I wore Nikes and not my uniform shoes.”
“Planning on going with them?”
“Hey, I’m keeping my options open. The cavalry may not come.”
Tasha thinks she hears a touch of shadow in Z’s voice. The events of last night—the conversation about Mr. Jackson—it must have sunken in through the hope like rain into soil. It dampens everything.
Tasha changes her underwear and puts on deodorant. There’s a mirror on the back of the closet door and Tasha avoids it purposefully. She fluffs her hair. She can feel its wildness. Okay, maybe just a glance. She approaches the mirror like a shrinking cur.
There she is. Brown and somewhat elongated by the mirror’s warp, her hair an explosion around her skull. She fluffs it again, works out a tangle or two with her fingers. There’s not really much that can be done without a big comb and a hair-tie. She finds herself smiling. The circles under her eyes are present as they always are, but she’s more interested in the eyes themselves. Whatever mascara had been left on her lashes is now a thin line of smudge under her eyes, the lashes bare. Without the mascara, her eyes seem softer. She uses the insides of her index fingers to wipe away the last traces of it. She runs a finger over her lips, which need Chapstick. Her skin is a little dry.
“I have Vaseline,” says Z, holding up the little jar. “Want some?”
“That’d be great, thanks.”
Z tosses the jar and Tasha catches it, turning back to the mirror. She rubs some over her mouth and a little more onto her face. Her skin is shiny now. She holds the jar, the lid off, staring at her reflection. Is this her real face? She looks for a mask in this reflection but can’t find it.
“He’s cute, right?” says Z, grinning a little.
Tasha isn’t sure she’s heard the whole sentence and darts her eyes at Z in the mirror.
“Who?”
“Ishmael, duh. I’m not talking about Malakai. He’s a child. What kind of perv do you think I am?”
Tasha puts the lid back on the Vaseline and tosses it back to Z.
“Yeah. He’s cute.”
“I’d even call him a hottie. I see why you were worried about him, a fine specimen like that.”
Tasha laughs. Z sounds so much like Gina—the best parts of Gina.
“I would agree with that.”
She’s glad when there’s a knock on the door.
“Come in,” Z calls.
It’s Malakai. He peeps around the doorjamb and his eyes sweep over the room before settling on Tasha. He’s probably seeing if there are bras or anything lying around, she thinks. Ahh, puberty.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey…,” Z replies, laughing when he doesn’t say anything else.
“Ish is making food if you guys want some.”
“Yeah, sure. We’ll be right down.”
He closes the door as slowly as humanly possible and Tasha laughs quietly.
“Boys,” she says, and Z nods.
Downstairs, Ishmael is stirring around cubed potatoes in a skillet on the stove. There are peppers in the mixture as well, and onions.
“What’s up,” he says as Z and Tasha wander into the kitchen. “How was your night? I hope Malakai didn’t wake you up with his snoring.”
He’s cheerful. Smoothing over last night, Tasha assumes. She wonders if he’s embarrassed at all that they had seen him crying. He hadn’t seemed ashamed at the time. It makes her like him.
“I don’t snore!” Malakai calls from the next room.
“It was fine,” Tasha says, “very quiet.”
“It’s an old house,” he says, dishing the potatoes out onto plates. “Built in 1980, I think.”
“Whoa. That’s old as hell,” Z says, looking around at the walls and ceiling with new interest, like she’s looking for priceless antiques or the Holy Grail.
“Still standing,” he says, making another plate. “My dad made a lot of improvements to it before he died.”
Tasha chews the potatoes, nodding. “It’s beautiful.”
He gestures to the food.
“Sorry it’s so weak. It’s hard to make breakfast just using canned food and all that. No eggs, no cheese, no meat. We’ve been eating a lot of potatoes.”
“No, it’s good, don’t worry. Thanks for cooking.”
“No doubt. Malakai, come eat!”
After breakfast, Tasha and Z convince Ishmael to let them wash the dishes. As the sink fills with filmy white suds, the strangeness of the world settles around her like the fog when waking up from a dream. She scrubs the last sticking potato from a plate. At the Web she and Z had cleared the floors one by one; here, Ishmael clears his block. Then they eat. They sleep. They wash hands and make conversation, they smile at each other. Then, if necessary, they kill again. She hands the last clean plate to Z to dry, turning off the water and flicking her wet fingers into the sink. Anything could be next. She feels as if she’s lived a thousand years. Ishmael reenters the kitchen with Malakai on his heels.
“We’re going on an errand in a few minutes. Do you want to come?”
“An errand?” Z
laughs. “Meaning? Going to pick up a movie? Go shopping? If you could grab me some Doritos while you’re out, that would be great.”
Ishmael half-smiles. Tasha briefly, almost defensively, wonders if he’s annoyed by Z’s sass.
“Actually we’re going a couple blocks down,” he says. “Remember last night we told you about the guy who is organizing people for the walk to California?”
“The Shepherd,” Malakai inserts.
The term “shepherd” doesn’t sit right with Tasha. It’s a little too blatantly messianic. She wonders if this mystery herder dubbed himself as the Shepherd, or if it was bestowed on him by his flocking followers. Surely he knows that one can’t give oneself a nickname, she thinks. It’s deeply lame.
“Yes, him,” Ishmael says patiently. Tasha hopes his tone means he thinks the moniker is lame too. “We’re going over to help him with a caravan that’s leaving tomorrow—preparing provisions, thinking about logistics, all that.” He pauses. “You can come if you want.”
Tasha looks at Z, who nods.
“Yeah, sure. Let me get my backpack.”
“It’s not far, right?” she hears Z ask as she heads for the stairs.
“Only a couple blocks. We’re going to walk. Don’t worry, we probably won’t see any action.”
Upstairs, Tasha picks up her backpack from where she left it on the bed. She doesn’t really need it, just the knife, but she doesn’t feel comfortable leaving it behind. There are things in it she has come to depend on, namely the can opener, and if she’s separated from these people too—it’s possible—she doesn’t want to be without her stuff.
She wonders if Z needs her bag, and goes to where it sits on the floor. It’s a black nylon thing that Tasha imagines the FBI carted drugs around in. She picks it up, and something flutters to the floor. Stooping to retrieve it, she sees it’s a photograph. She’s almost afraid to look—her own photographs are people she has lost. But she looks anyway. It’s a handsome young man, his hair black and shaggy, a mole on his cheek. His smile is even and broad. He looks remarkably like Z. He wears a uniform, all white, a Navy man. His arm is around a girl’s shoulders, her hair styled high, her slight figure wrapped in a pink dress. It’s Z. She’s a little younger, but it’s her. Tasha flips it over, but there’s no date. The picture was taken with a high-end camera like Tasha’s father’s: the image is crisp and bright, their smiles glowing. The photograph itself has been taken care of: its edges are neat and unwrinkled. Tasha puts it back in the bag, from where she supposes it fell.
Downstairs, Ishmael receives her with a nod.
“Ready? We’re going out the back door.”
Ishmael’s mother’s house has a backyard as well as a front one, and a snug back porch screened in to keep out bugs. The backyard doesn’t have a garden like the neighbor’s; instead there’s a birdbath at the center with a narrow concrete path leading to it and lots of flowers. The flowers take Tasha by surprise. She’s lost track of the days and suddenly it’s spring. It’s May, she knows. Sometime in May. Even with the strange weather, and even in Chicago, there are flowers in May. Tasha has the urge to stop and smell them as the group passes through the yard, but she knows this is stupid. Instead she trails her fingers along a row of tulips, their heads bobbing in her wake.
The back gate is tall and wooden, a privacy fence. Tasha thinks it’s more likely that the Minkers would mistake it for a wall, but it has a chain wrapped around its posts too. As they approach it, Ishmael kneels, knitting his fingers together. Malakai steps into the web of his brother’s hands and Ishmael hoists him up until Malakai’s fingers curl over the top of the fence. He peers over the top, looking around, then says “Okay” and Ishmael brings him down. They open the gates, and the group moves into the alley.
The alley behind Perry Avenue is less pleasant than Perry Avenue itself, which had been neat and cute. The alley is narrow and cluttered with trash bins and the rusty skeletons of old bicycles. There are bodies here, too, always bodies. They pass a young man around Tasha’s age, staring blankly up at the sky.
Malakai looks at the body, then away.
“He used to sell break,” he says, referring to the hybrid drug developed in the ‘20s, an amalgamation of crack and household chemicals. “We weren’t too upset when we saw that the Minkers got him.”
They continue down the alley until it opens onto another street, 78th Place. It’s a short lane that lacks the charm of Perry Avenue, but there are more trees: old trees, not like the dogwood saplings on Berwyn in Tasha’s neighborhood. She doesn’t know what kind they are—she vaguely recognizes some of the leaves as oak or maple. She wonders if the giraffes she let loose in Lincoln Park are somewhere happily munching on similar flora. You’re welcome, she thinks.
Ishmael turns again, and they follow him onto Lafayette, a broader street from which they can see the L. Like at Berwyn, a train is stopped on one of the four sets of tracks, its doors open. There’s another train too, not the L: the Metralux, a high-speed bullet of a machine that had carried Chicagoans as far as Florida. Somehow it’s come off the tracks entirely, and has crossed over multiple lanes where other trains would have been had traffic conditions been less fortunate. Malakai sees her looking and says,
“It was really loud when that happened. Mom thought something exploded. It kind of did. It burned for awhile.”
Tasha can’t imagine a train burning fifty yards from her house. She thinks of the intense silence of the first few days of the Change, how she’d holed up inside her apartment like a mole, cleaning her burrow as if it really mattered. What a joke.
They come to a corner on Lafayette with two garages facing the street. Tasha gets the feeling that nothing has changed on this block in decades. Close to the garages is a bus stop, after all. There are zero buses in her neighborhood; the Volamu and trains take people where they need to go. But the city neglected this part of town in most ways, and public transportation was no exception.
Ishmael approaches the garage on the right and stoops to raise its door a foot or so. Malakai rolls under and Ishmael uses his head to beckon to Z and Tasha, who do the same. When they’re under, Malakai holds the door while Ishmael rolls in, and together they lower it quietly.
The garage is dim and smells vaguely of an old smell it takes Tasha a moment to recognize: gasoline. Her parents’ house had a shed that smelled like this: gasoline and wood, and the sharp odor of metal. She also, inexplicably, smells peanuts. What else? She sniffs. Tar. Cabbage. Sweat. In all, very unpleasant.
Ishmael leads them through the low light to a small staircase, at the top of which is a white door. He raps on it, and it opens almost immediately.
At the top of the stairs, peering out from his kitchen where Tasha smells tea or perhaps coffee, is an average-sized man of sixty-five or so. He’s the color of an almond and wears almond-shaped glasses sitting on the bridge of a nose that might have been broken when he was a younger man. He looks serene. Probably because of his fine curly hair, Tasha thinks. At his age she would think it’d be thinning by now, but it’s not. He wears a black cardigan sweater with pockets and three buttons holding it closed over the slightest of potbellies. At first glance, he is a great-uncle. A piano teacher. But Tasha looks into his eyes, which are sweeping over the little crowd in his garage, eyeing them like a sparrowhawk. He is sharp, fierce. His spectacles could be X-ray vision goggles, disguised on his neat, studious face.
“Guys,” Ishmael says, standing to the side to allow Tasha and Z first entrance, “this is Dr. Rio.”
Chapter 25
“The Shepherd,” Malakai says from behind them.
“Oh, Malakai, I wish you wouldn’t call me that,” Dr. Rio says, standing to one side to allow the small party entrance.
“Why not?” the kid says, looking gloomy. “That’s what everybody else calls you.”
“Everybody else,” Dr. Rio bustles into the kitchen and takes a pot off the stove—tea—, “does not know me as well as you know me. So Dr. Rio wi
ll suffice.”
“Okay,” says Malakai. He’s cheered. He’s in a secret club.
Tasha remains close to the garage door, attempting to keep her face as flat as an ironed shirt and hoping Z—whose eyes are darting to and from Tasha’s face—has the sense to do the same. She’s standing in the kitchen of Dr. Rio, watching him pour tea. For some reason it’s like meeting the mayor, or a local celebrity: she feels like she should be asking for his autograph, rushing up and fawning over him. I’ve heard all about you, she could say, I love your work. But she hasn’t, and she doesn’t. She knows nothing about him other than her sister wrote his name in slanting, urgent letters on a torn piece of paper, telling her to find him. Well, she found him. And although his kitchen smells nice and he doesn’t appear to be dangerous, Tasha thinks she’ll play her cards slowly and quietly for now.
Dr. Rio turns from pouring tea into a mug. Not one of those mugs that releases sugar and whatever else into the drink from the base of the cup—just a mug. He looks at Tasha and Z appraisingly—a hint of the sparrowhawk gaze from a moment before—over the top of his spectacles. Tasha notices that he holds his left hand in an almost-ball: the fingers bent as if ready to become a fist at any moment, or to grasp a tool which might become a weapon.
“Who are your guests, boys?” he says.
“These are some friends I reconnected with, Tasha and Z,” says Ishmael from the other side of the kitchen, where he leans against the counter. “They gave Malakai a ride home.”
“A ride?”
“We had a car,” says Z, “but it didn’t last very long.”
“Ahh, like most machines, my dear,” the doctor laughs.
Tasha studies his spectacles, which have slid a little lower on his nose. They add to his doctorly appearance, but they’re elegant. She wonders if a wife helped pick them out.