Shit.
Dear Mom and Dad,
After the summer, Elliot came to say he was sorry. We slept together for the last time, and then he left me. I thought I was pregnant. Then I pushed the Picasso and met a girl who is in trouble, and I don’t know how to help her, but I want to. I also stole your pumpkin for her little brother. I’m not pregnant.
God fucking damn it.
Dear Mom and Dad,
I pushed the sculpture, and I don’t know what to do. I don’t want everything to change, but either way it does. I think it already has. I miss you. I love you. Don’t tell Adam.
I save all the letters in a folder I call TRY AGAIN and then drop that folder between old essays, internship cover letters, and term papers. I missed lunch, but I have a bag of pretzels in my bag, so I eat them on my way back to Theory of Knowledge, where we explore the “big questions” of philosophers who tend to die tragically. Socrates was sentenced and drank himself to death; Descartes caught a really bad cold; Spinoza inhaled glass dust; Foucault died of AIDS. I have to make it through the day. Let’s see what the ancients can do for me.
twenty-five
I NEED YOU.
where r u?
DO YOU HAVE THE PICTURE?
yes.
CAN YOU MEET ME IN GEORGETOWN?
r u ok?
JUST COME.
can u meet me at school?
FINE. GIVE ME TWENTY MINUTES.
twenty-six
First thing I see is my green sweater walking fast up the hill. I walk out to meet her, so we can start getting farther away from whoever might be watching. Eva looks terrible. She looks like she’s slept about two hours in the last two days. Her skin is more ash than brown, and her hair is greasy and pasted to the top of her head.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“I’m fine,” she says, smiling a little. “Hey, I’m sorry about what I said on the phone the other day. About going to the museum and telling on you. I was really worked up.”
“I get it,” I say. “It’s been a rough couple of days for me too.”
“Is the guy bothering you again?”
I smirk. “No. Actually, the guy is pretty much lost, I think.”
“Oh. Well, sometimes that’s better,” she says, her hands in her pocket.
“Yeah,” I say. “Anyway, I have the picture. You want to sit somewhere?”
“No, that’s okay. Can I just see it?”
“All right, but you have to promise not to get pissed. It’s not in the daylight, but it’s proof that he’s there, like you asked.”
“I promise,” she says, and puts her hand on her heart. It’s shaking.
I hand Bogart over and show her the picture of the pumpkin, bracing for the worst.
It takes her a while to figure it out, then she smiles a really tender smile, a small upward crack in the tired plaster her face has become, and I think that maybe lying and stealing are not so bad, if it can make someone so tired smile.
She gives me the camera back and doesn’t say a word. Instead, she just sits down, right there on someone’s sloping lawn. I stay standing. The silence is really scaring me.
“We’ve never done that,” she says.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“We never carved a pumpkin together,” she says.
Fuck, fuck, fucking fuck.
“I’m glad they did that with him. He must have loved it.”
“Can I ask you something?” I say.
She doesn’t answer.
“Do you have a place to sleep?” I ask.
She laughs. “Is it because I look like shit?”
“Well … ”
“I really do,” she says. “You want to see something?”
She untangles her hair from the rubber band and runs her hands through it. It stands out like a greasy lion’s mane.
“It’s bad, huh?” She smiles again.
“It’s pretty bad,” I say.
She smells her armpits. “I smell too, right?”
I shrug.
“No, seriously, smell me.”
“No thanks.”
“Come on. Come and smell me and tell me I don’t smell like a fucking pigeon.”
And that does it. I start laughing like I haven’t laughed in years, tears-in-my-eyes, peeing-in-my-pants laughing. Every time I look up, she’s holding up her greasy hair and motioning for me to come closer, and it makes me laugh even harder, until I can barely breathe.
When it’s over, I feel completely empty.
Eva straightens up and braids her dirty hair.
“Let me see the altar photo,” she says.
“Now you want to see the altar?” I joke.
“Don’t make me beg,” she says.
I scroll to the picture, and Eva sighs and squints and sighs again.
“How did you know I didn’t erase it?”
“Magic,” she says.
“Of course. I do love that picture,” I say.
She pulls the gold fish out from underneath her sweater and holds on to it.
“Hey, Eva, seriously, do you have a place to sleep?”
She turns to face me. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll make you a deal. If you get me one more picture, I’ll wash my hair.”
“I’m serious,” I say.
“So am I. Dead serious.”
“I really think … ”
“What?” she says—sharp, loud.
“I really think you should go back home,” I say.
“I told you I can’t right now,” she says.
“I know you said your mom was sick, but don’t you think it’s better if you go through it together?”
“My mom doesn’t need me anymore,” she says.
“Maybe not, but Pablo does,” I say.
She says something in Spanish.
“I don’t understand,” I say.
“No,” she says, “you don’t. Here. Here’s a key to the house. I’m sending you there. Do whatever you need. Tell them. Don’t tell them. Just get me a picture of Pablo. Meet me at the zoo tomorrow, at four, in front of the cheetahs, and I swear to God I’ll leave you alone.”
She puts the key in my bag and walks away. I swear to my God, leaving is the last thing I want her to do.
twenty-seven
Mom: You won’t believe what happened.
Me: What?
Mom: Somebody took our jack-o’-lantern.
Me: Oh. Really?
Mom: Yeah. Who does that?
Me: I don’t know. Maybe some kids
thought it might be funny.
Mom: It’s not funny.
Me: I’m sorry.
Mom: It’s okay. I got another one.
Me: Really?
Mom: Of course. You want to help me carve?
Me: Sure. Can we make it different?
Mom: Okay. What do you want?
Bat? Ghost? Scary face?
Me: Ghost.
Mom: Ghost it is.
twenty-eight
“Excuse me Mama. Mama? Do you know that if that cheetah wanted to, it could eat you in five seconds and jump over the fence and grab you and you cannot stop it because it’s the fastest animal in the world, faster than your car and an airplane and even faster than a whale and the whole ocean when there are big, enormous waves?”
“Wow, really?” Her voice is engaged, but she’s looking at a map of the zoo.
“Yes. Really. AND it can jump with all the legs at the same time like this, but it has four legs, and also it has spots. But it doesn’t climb trees like the leopard so don’t worry. It won’t fall on your head.”
“Good,” the mama says.
“Yeah. Good. But if you look at the tiger in her eyes, she’ll get scared, b
ecause she doesn’t want to see your eyes, because she’s walking near the water, and she’s hungry.”
“You want to go see the tiger?” Mama asks.
“Okay. But don’t look at her,” he answers.
“I won’t.”
“I will look at her, but not in her eyes.”
“Sounds good,” Mama says.
“Yeah,” he answers.
“Let’s go.”
The mother and child disappear into the mini-savannah that connects the cheetahs to the zebras, where you can walk through the tall grass and imagine what it’s like to be hunting antelope. The only cheetah I spot is asleep, under a rock dome, oblivious to the striped prey prancing on the other side of a metal fence. Presumably, back in Africa, they would have made an excellent dinner. Here, the cheetahs get fed twice a day, and all they have to do is walk to the gray house when the keepers come around. I wouldn’t tell the kid that.
Eva walks up the path wearing a new sweater. It’s blue. She also has a new pair of jeans on and her hair is down. Her hands are in her pocket.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hey.”
“I told you I’d clean up,” she says.
“I have your key.”
She doesn’t say anything for a while, then her face softens into something like hope.
“Did you go in?” she says softly.
“No.”
She takes one hand out of her pocket and puts it on my shoulder. My body tightens and she pulls her hand away.
“Do you want to sit somewhere?” she says.
Something is different today. She’s not even mad I didn’t go in.
“Actually, I would rather walk.”
“Okay. Where do you want to go?” she asks.
“I don’t know. You probably know this place better than I do.”
“Probably. We used to come here a lot.”
I think she means with her mother, but I know better than to ask. Not right now. We pass the pandas and head down the hill, but they’ve closed off the house where the hippo and the elephants used to live.
“I don’t know where they’ve put the hippo,” Eva says. “Pablo loved him. We’d wait for him to come up and snort and laugh our asses off. My mom was the best at making animal noises. She did the best elephant.”
I nod and swerve around a bulldozer, past the small mammals to the back of the ape house. The gorillas aren’t out today. It’s too cold for them.
“Can we go in here?” I ask, already pushing the back door.
Eva nods.
“Sure,” she says. “I love the gorillas.”
We’re doing the exhibit backwards, but there’s no one here to get on our case. The orangutans are looking especially shaggy, picking fleas out of each other’s hair, neck, and elbows. One of them has a gaping wound on his neck that makes me look away. It reminds me of the hole in the Irish singer’s guitar. Each time the orangutan swings from one branch to the other, the scar opens up a little, but nothing falls out, and nothing seems to be back there. It’s just an open, flappy wound. I wish someone would tell me what happened to him.
“That’s Mandara,” Eva says, pointing to the gorillas in their indoor playgrounds. “Over there. She’s the super-mom.”
A long, black, hairy arm hangs loose from the side of a hammock, and the fingers scrape the floor from time to time. I follow the arm to a shoulder, then a long face with sad, peaceful eyes. As we approach the glass, Mandara turns around and gives us her back. A tiny gorilla climbs over her waist to the other side. I had missed the baby before.
“That’s Kibibi,” Eva says. “It means little girl. She was born last year, to one of the silverback boys chewing over there.”
I count four other gorillas. Most of them are eating. They sit down on their heels and then shuffle around and sit again.
“How do you know all this stuff?”
Eva shrugs. “I like animals.”
I nod.
“They’re comforting, you know. They don’t break your balls. They don’t need much. They just do their thing, no questions, no bullshit.”
“I guess,” I say.
When the silverback moves, the others get out of his way. He looks bored to me, unchallenged in his cage.
“It doesn’t make you a little sad?” I ask.
“What?” Eva says, her eyes fixed on the scene behind the glass.
“I don’t know. That they’re captive and stuff,” I say.
Eva laughs.
“I hate to break it to you, but we’re a lot more captive than they are. Look at her,” she says, pointing to the mother gorilla. “Does she look worried to you?”
I stand on my toes to look at Kibibi and her mother again. The little one is sucking on her mother’s breast, and her fingers are spread over the dark brown chest. Mandara, the mother, is neither bothered nor endeared—she just is.
Eva is right. If I were a gorilla, I wouldn’t have any of these issues. I wouldn’t have choices. It would all just be instinct. I would eat, or I would starve. I would mate, or I would sleep. I would live, or I would die. That’s it. No rituals—no funerals, no baby showers, no prayers. No art, no music.
It’s gotten so bad, I can’t decide if I’d rather be a gorilla.
“Are you ready to go?” Eva sounds impatient now. She’s found a bench and is staring at the rubbery plants in the foyer.
I’d like to stay a little longer, but I can tell her mood is changing, so I follow her and try to work up the courage to confess that I don’t have a new picture. I am here because she asked me to come. I’m here for her. Because I have her key in my pocket and her book in my bag, and because I want to know her story, since I’m now a part of it. She is Picasso, and I pushed her over. It’s my work to lift her back up.
I look up at the wires hanging over our heads for the orangutans to swing around on.
“Do your parents know about this?” Eva says suddenly.
“About the pictures?”
“About us.”
She’s looking at her shoes. I notice she’s not wearing any socks.
“They don’t,” I say.
Eva nods.
“Why do you want to know?” I ask.
“Never mind.”
“What?” I insist.
“Did they tell you not to come or something?” she says, her eyes on something too far away for me to see.
“I told you. They don’t know.”
“Okay, I got it. I thought you might be close to your parents.”
“I am,” I say.
“Okay, good, I just—”
“What makes you think I’m not? What makes you think they would want to know? I’m taking pictures of your house, so what? You basically blackmailed me.”
It all comes out fast, probably to flood the thing I’m afraid to say.
“I didn’t blackmail you.” She sounds upset. “You agreed to take the pictures.”
I bite my lip and breathe. I think of all the times I could have dropped out, from the planetarium to the house key, and how I always chose to go on. Maybe this is my fate, like Eva said on the first day. Whether in the Book of Life or the Book of the Dead, our names are written right next to each other. Eva and Miriam. Picasso and Paloma.
“You wanted to take the pictures,” Eva says softly, as if reading my thoughts.
“Maybe,” I say, “but I still don’t know why.”
“Because you can,” she says.
“What about you?”
“What do you mean?” she asks.
“You wouldn’t even have to take pictures. You could just walk right through that front door. Use your own key.”
I put my hand in my pocket, but I don’t take it out yet.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she
says, grimacing.
“You said so yourself. Everybody’s there. What are you doing here?”
“Watch the way you talk to me,” she hisses. “The real reason your parents don’t know about me is because you were too scared to tell them about the Picasso.”
I try to imagine the strongest thing I know. The ocean comes up first, but I’d rather picture something solid, something that stands still. I see the locust tree in Adam’s backyard. I am the locust tree, I think. She cannot move me. Eva sighs.
“Let me see the picture,” she says.
My spine grows longer.
“Please show me the picture,” she says.
“I don’t have anything,” I say.
She examines my face with her usual intensity.
“You’re lying,” she says.
I’m breathing short, thick breaths. Tree breaths. My tongue pushes hard against my teeth.
“I don’t lie,” I say.
“We know that’s not true,” she says.
“Not to you,” I say.
“But I asked you to please get a picture of Pablo,” she pleads. “I gave you a key.”
“I couldn’t,” I say.
“Why not?” she says.
“I was carving a pumpkin with my mother,” I say, as serious as I can be.
She looks up like she’s thinking hard, or trying hard not to think.
“That sounds nice,” she says.
“It was,” I say, surprised at how true that is, and how quickly she changed her tone.
“I loved my mother too,” she says.
“You don’t love her anymore?”
She looks horrified.
“Of course I do,” she says.
“Sorry,” I say.
“It’s okay. It’s just sometimes it’s not enough to love people.”
Where You End Page 13