“Guys, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but Saul had a work emergency that’s going to take up most of the afternoon,” Mom says. Apparently Lionel has convinced her to dress for the occasion, too: A vibrant blue baseball cap with the Dodgers logo sits on top of her close-cropped hair.
“What?”
It’s only then, when Lion is standing stock-still, staring at my mother, that I realize it’s more than him bursting into my room and the rapid talking and the chewed skin around his thumbs. He’s always up before me now, and he always has a million plans to execute before I’ve even finished my coffee. Yesterday, he was gone so long during the day that I started to worry, and he stayed up late once he was back home. The light was blazing in the space under his door when I got up to pee at four a.m.
Mom’s eyes are apologetic as she looks at Lionel. “He’s going to try to make it to the game if he can, sweetie. But we should probably head out now if we want to get there for the first pitch.”
“Why didn’t he call me?” Lionel sounds way too upset about this. He’s not one to let a minor snag in a plan get under his skin, and up until this year—the past couple of weeks, even—I’ve never known him to be into baseball like this.
“He barely had time to talk,” Mom says slowly. She can tell something is off, too. “We’ll make it up to you, Lionel. We’ll pick another day that we can all go, no excuses.”
“This is bullshit,” he mutters and then, without warning, he slams his open palm against the frame of the bathroom door. The smack is loud and angry and scary—something I never expected to see from Lion.
“Sweetie, I’m sorry.” Mom’s voice is measured but her eyes are wide with worry. “Why don’t you take a minute and meet us downstairs when you’re ready, okay?”
“No! This is fucking bullshit! We’re all supposed to be together and this fucking ruins everything.” His voice ricochets off the walls, at the loudest volume I think anyone has ever spoken in our house.
Mom looks at me then, and I realize by the unfamiliar expression on her face that she has no idea what to do. We are not a shouting family and we aren’t a family that really loses control in any way. Problems are discussed rationally, and usually over food. Disagreements are settled by the end of the night. But we get along well, so those times are rare. And this, from Lionel, is unheard of.
He starts pacing then, back and forth from the door of the bathroom to the door of his room. His face is turning redder by the minute as he keeps pushing his hair back and muttering incomplete sentences. He’s getting louder, too, and on the other side of him, standing at the top of the stairs to the first floor, Mom watches wordlessly.
“Lionel, I’m going to call your father, okay?” she says after it’s clear he isn’t going to stop anytime soon.
He doesn’t hear her, or if he does, he doesn’t acknowledge it. Two, three, four more paces and he stalks into his bedroom, slamming the door so hard I’m surprised it doesn’t rock off the hinges.
Mom takes in a breath and doesn’t look away from his door as she says, “Stay right here, baby. I’m going to get my phone.”
I nod, my eyes glued to the door, too. He’s still shouting, something about disrespect and honoring commitments, and I can hear other unidentifiable noises in the background as he moves around. I almost want it to be drugs, because my brother isn’t just acting out of the norm for our family—he’s acting like a completely different person.
My mother doesn’t make it halfway down the stairs before the first crash comes. I shut my eyes, and my shoulders go up to my ears. It sounds like the roof has caved in on this part of the house.
“Lion!” I cry out, and Mom leaps back up the stairs in an instant. I hold my breath as she turns the knob, afraid he’s locked us out, but the door opens at the exact moment an identical crash shakes the house.
She goes in first and I stand in the doorway, mouth open wide at the state of Lion’s room. He hasn’t been in here even thirty seconds, and the place is a complete wreck. He’s swept everything off his desk and ripped his sheets from the mattress and torn posters from the wall. But the loud noises were his books. They’re piled in massive heaps, crushed under the heavy bookcases, which he pushed away from the wall until they crashed to the floor.
“Everything is ruined,” I can hear him saying.
Hear, because I can’t look at him. Not now. I’m too afraid to look up and see that the person acting so erratically is actually my brother.
“Ruined!”
I don’t see him make the fist but I catch him pulling it out of the wall. And then I see him do it again. And again. And I see his hand come back the last time with bloody knuckles.
He’s breathing heavily, his chest heaving as if he’s just run a marathon. He looks at my mother, who is frozen in shock, and my stomach sinks. I wonder if he’ll turn his wrath on her next.
But he just whips his head back and forth as he says, “Why did he have to ruin everything? This is tradition and we’re all supposed to be there and he ruined it. He fucking ruined it, Nadine.”
“Oh, honey. He’s so sorry, okay? So am I.” She walks to him slowly and I stand on guard in case he lunges at the last minute and I have to step in. Step in to defend my mother from my brother. I keep thinking, hoping, that I’ll wake up in my tower, drenched in sweat, but every time I blink, my eyes keep coming back to the incomprehensible scene in front of me.
Lionel doesn’t do anything. He just stands still with his chest heaving and his injured hand curled at his side. When she reaches him she gathers him up quickly in her arms, perhaps too afraid of what will happen if she doesn’t. She guides Lion over to the bare mattress and eases him down to a sitting position and holds him. She rocks him back and forth as he cries, his voice and tears muffled beneath her arms.
“It’s okay, sweetheart,” she murmurs to him, the same voice she used when I had bad dreams as a kid. “It’s going to be okay.” She looks over her shoulder then, not quite making eye contact as she says to me, her voice brisk and businesslike, “Suzette, go get your phone and call Saul. Keep calling back until he answers. Tell him we need him here. Now.”
Tears start streaming down my face as soon as Saul answers, and I’m crying so hard he can barely understand me. Even when I manage to hiccup out an explanation, it doesn’t make sense. None of this makes sense. But Saul understands enough to know he is needed. He says he’s leaving to come home right now.
Lionel’s agitation has decreased by the time I get off the phone, but Mom never leaves his side, not even when Saul gets home. They talk to him, try to find out the root of the problem, but he keeps saying he doesn’t know what happened, why he was so upset. He looks scared and sad, sitting between our parents in the middle of his debris-filled room, and I wish there was something I could do besides watch from the sidelines.
We don’t talk that night, Lionel and me. He doesn’t talk to anyone, really. We eat dinner, but no one is hungry. We all end up pushing food around our plates until Lionel says he’d like to be excused. Mom and Saul don’t want to let him go; I can tell by the way they look at each other. But they can’t keep him down here all night, either.
Later, after everyone is supposed to be in bed, I creep down the stairs to listen outside Lionel’s room. When I slowly turn the knob, he’s asleep. No late-night projects or lists to be made or whatever else he would do in here until the early hours of the morning. I’m not relieved, though. Something is wrong. Mom and Saul tried to disguise their worry, but they’re clearly just as concerned as I am.
Saul and I picked up some of the mess in the room after dinner while Lionel took a shower, giving him enough space to get around without tripping over the books and their shelves. Still, Lion looks like he’s sleeping in a cave made of books.
I close the door and tiptoe across the hall to Mom and Saul’s room. Their light is off, but their voices murmur behind the door. I press my ear closer to hear what they’re saying.
“… one of the scari
est moments of my life,” Mom is saying. “I didn’t know what he was going to do. And he didn’t, either. He looked so… outside of himself.”
Saul sighs. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t here, Nadine. You shouldn’t have had to go through that by yourself.”
“Don’t apologize. He’s my child, too. I just… I’m worried.”
He sighs again and I hear rustling, like he’s turning over. “We’ll figure it out. Dr. Carver is going to get us in first thing tomorrow.” He pauses, then says again, “We’ll figure it out.”
There’s no space to sleep on the floor in Lionel’s room, so I pad silently into the guest room and shut the door behind me. I don’t sleep much, if at all, but that just makes it easier to get up and check on Lionel throughout the night.
I do so every hour until the sun rises. I have to leave before my parents get up, so I make the bed and close the door and slip back to my room without making a sound.
thirteen.
When I walk into Castillo Flowers two days later, I stop as soon as I see Rafaela.
I dreamed about her, and I forgot until now. We were at Dinsmore and we were rooming together and there was no Iris. Rafaela and I held hands in public and kissed in public and when we were alone, I wasn’t shy about touching her first. It was so real, not like a dream at all. I haven’t ever dreamed about Emil, not like that, and I wonder if that’s my subconscious trying to tell me something.
My neck and cheeks are hot, and I take a few seconds to catch my breath. When I walk over to the counter, I’m sure she’ll ask me what’s wrong. But she says nothing.
“Hi.” I dump my bag on a shelf in the back room, squeeze behind the register to grab my apron, and still, she doesn’t respond.
She barely looks up. Her gaze never quite makes it to me; she’s staring at the bonsais across the room and her expression is confused, as if she has no idea why she’s not still looking down at the counter.
“Hello?” I try again, waving a hand in front of her face until her eyes snap into focus.
“Hey.” She attempts a smile, but I’m not convinced.
I tie my apron around my waist and notice hers isn’t even fastened. The strings dangle freely on either side of her. My eyes travel upward, to the black tank she’s wearing with the oversized armholes that reveal the sides of a hot-pink bra underneath. I start talking so I’ll look away.
“Everything okay? You seem a little out of it.”
She leans against the wall behind the counter, her curls twining around a pushpin in the corkboard. The board is pinned with notes from satisfied customers, scrawled on everything from notebook paper to fancy monogrammed stationery. Most people send an email, but Ora is old-fashioned enough to attract customers with the same appreciation for handwritten praise.
“You know that guy… from the Palisades?” Rafaela sighs. “He’s becoming a real problem. As in, he won’t leave me the fuck alone. He—” She stops to look at me. “Are you okay with me telling you this?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I’m going out with your brother tomorrow, and I know you guys are close, so… I just don’t want it to be weird.” She looks at me with raised eyebrows. “Is it weird?”
“God, no.” And I probably sound a bit too chipper, considering she’s talking about people she was or is interested in, and neither of them is me. But there’s no point in her knowing how I feel, or that I’ve had dreams where she was with me instead of my brother. “Lion and I are cool about that stuff.”
“Lion?” she repeats with a soft laugh. “That’s damn cute. Anyway, this dude called me at Ora’s—on her landline. And she answered the phone and I told her I didn’t want to talk to him and now she’s all upset because she’s afraid—”
I think she’s going to interrupt herself to ask if I’m still okay with her telling me this, but she doesn’t finish. And when I prompt her, she shakes her head.
“It’s nothing. She’s just afraid I’m going to fuck up.”
There’s an again on the end of that, I know it. But the word never falls from Rafaela’s lips, so I pretend it isn’t dangling in the air between us.
“Let’s just say that my date with Lion couldn’t come at a better time.” She flashes me an expression halfway between a smirk and a proper smile, and I decide to let her use my nickname for him just this once. A freebie. No one calls him that but me, not even DeeDee, and it would be just as strange if someone else started calling me Little.
The bell above the door comes to life and jars something in Rafaela. She finishes tying her apron and steps from behind the counter just as a man wearing sunglasses enters and announces he’s looking for something “exotic.”
I came in later today, so for the first time since I started working here, I help her close up the shop. I even see the elusive Héctor, who rarely makes it farther than the back room when he’s restocking for deliveries. He drops off the keys from the van and sticks his head in to say good night before he leaves.
Rafaela hums as we sweep the floors and wipe down the displays. Her humming grows louder as she looks at the delivery log, making sure everything is in the proper order for tomorrow. And then, by the time she removes her apron, she’s singing under her breath. Even at such a low volume, it’s clear she has a good voice.
“You sing?”
She looks up, startled, as if she’d forgotten I was in the room. “Oh. Sorry.”
I finish scooping Tucker’s litter box, which didn’t turn out to be the horrific task I anticipated, though I found it somewhat insulting that he watched me the whole time from three feet away. “Sorry? You have an amazing voice.”
She doesn’t deny the compliment, but instead says thank you. I like that there’s no false modesty. “I used to sing. I was in choir. At my old school… and my old church.” She opens the register to begin removing the money, which she’ll put in a locked box until first thing tomorrow morning when Ora drops it off at the bank. Then she looks at me and grins. “Just how amazing?”
“Really amazing.” I’m tending to Tucker’s overnight provisions now: fresh water and half a scoop of dry food in his stainless steel bowls. “But you know that.”
“Yeah, maybe.” I can tell she’s still smiling without looking at her. “I like hearing it from you, though.”
My skin burns like the moment I walked in, and I conjure my brother’s face, force myself to think about how much he likes her. He sat in my room for thirty minutes last night, asking my opinion on everything from what he should wear on their date to whether he’ll look cheap if he doesn’t spring for valet.
There’s a pause as Rafaela waits for me to respond. And I’m tempted to flirt back with her. Because it feels good to be open about it, and because I dreamed of her, and because of those gorgeous purple lips. But I don’t. I scratch my fingers along Tucker’s cheeks and ask her, “Are we just about done?”
“Yeah.” She clears her throat as if she’s realigning her train of thought. “Is Lionel picking you up tonight?”
“My mom,” I say, relieved that I don’t have to sit in a car with my brother and my guilt.
“Oh. Well… do you have to go home right away? Ora is going out tonight and… I’m probably being paranoid, but I can’t stop thinking about how that guy called her house and he knows where I live and—I make really good pasta. I could cook dinner and drive you home later.”
I’m surprised to see the anxiety is not just in her voice but reflected on her face, too. I know so little about Rafaela, but I never expected she’d be so vulnerable in front of me.
My family eats dinner together most nights, but I’m really thinking of Lionel. How he’d react if he knew I was feeling this way about Rafaela. How I’d worry that it would make him quieter and quieter until I never saw him anymore, until he lost interest in her and his books and the rest of his life, until he was so low that I wouldn’t see even a couple of hours of sleep unless I was close to him, staying a few feet away in the guest room.
&nb
sp; But just because I like her, that doesn’t mean I have to act on it. I get the feeling she had to swallow a lot of pride to ask me to come over, and the guy from the Palisades clearly has no sense of boundaries. She shouldn’t be alone when she’s so scared.
I say yes and she smiles and I tell myself it’s okay to stop thinking about Lionel’s well-being for a few hours. I tell myself it’s okay to take a break.
Ora’s house is cute, a pale blue bungalow with comfortable furniture and art everywhere and just enough room for the two of them. It smells good, like someone dusted cinnamon around the rooms. Rafaela hangs her bag on a hook by the door and gestures for me to do the same. I instantly spy two cats, a small calico and one with lots of gray fur.
“That’s Hall and Oates,” Rafaela says as she heads toward the kitchen with them trotting along behind her. “It’s their dinnertime now, too.”
“Doesn’t Tucker miss them?” I follow her to the kitchen, which is painted a warm yellow and has a checkerboard floor and a window box filled with potted succulents and cactuses, but no flowers.
Rafaela reaches into the pantry for a can of wet food and pops the top, splitting it evenly between two bowls with a fork. “Tucker lives at the shop because he’s an asshole to other cats. Ora says he used to terrorize these two.”
“Where is Ora?”
“At a movie. She’s been out twice in the last week.” Rafaela washes her hands as the cats devour their meal. “You could be single-handedly responsible for saving my aunt’s social life.”
She sets a big pot of water on the stove and assembles a cutting board full of vegetables. I offer to help, but she refuses to let me and instead pours us both a glass of white wine.
“Dump it if Ora comes in” is her only stipulation, so I try to relax and tell myself there’s no reason at all to feel like I’m on a date with the girl my brother will be taking on a date tomorrow.
Little & Lion Page 13