Zazen

  Let me know,

  Della

  There had been a big debate and we held a family council about it when I was twelve. Should we celebrate Cady on her birthday or on the day of her death? The argument split along these lines:

  Celebrating Cady on her birthday—All the obvious reasons.

  Celebrating Cady on the anniversary of her death—People hide the sad things in the world from their sight. Bury their grief and, not facing the pain of their loss, devalue everything around them. They act like there’s just one piece missing when what is missing was a part of everything. That’s what it was like when Cady was gone and we decided to mark the day she left us because that’s when it all changed. For me, it could have been any day.

  I folded the note for Jimmy and slipped it under the door.

  There was a whirr of trees when the bus went off the cliff. I put my hand against the glass and green blurry streaks raced beneath my fingers. I imagine her in the thorny arms of wild blackberries singing. Mom used to say that we should look sadness right in the eye. I look Cady right in the eye, my older sister, thirteen, crying, tangled in metal, shining. I cannot turn away.

  Cady Elizabeth Mylinek

  You are always welcome at any gathering:

  019791993.13

  I lay back on the carpet in front of Jimmy’s door. The wind was pressing against the windows. I was thinking it’s like a castle. Outside it’s so dark that even armies sleep next to each other, all dreaming of tomorrow’s war. I was sure if I got up and went back down to the street I would hear nothing but owls and the breath of soldiers.

  “How did they meet?” Jimmy asked me once. “Your parents.”

  “Dad came here on an academic visa. He’d been in the Paris student movement before that. They met at the library.”

  “Right. Credence told me that once.”

  “She was in there every day researching the history of regional water rights. It was very romantic.”

  “I’m sure it was,” she laughed.

  “No. Really. It was. Miroslav and Grace. They were the hot couple of the underground New Left. No doubt about it.”

  Grace would think what I had done at the box-mall-church was stupid. She wouldn’t have said it. That’s not how you educate through organizing.

  Lying in the hallway that night I saw my mother like she was there. Her hair was the color of honey and her eyes were the color of rich earth. Grace. She was wearing a blue cotton blouse and on it were land use maps, hearing dates and statistics from the Water Bureau. Across her body, rivers flowed. They poured over property lines and carved canyons from unclaimed lands. I traced those waters with my fingertips from source to delta making circles in the air and slept that night in the hallway with all of us together, Grace, Cady and me, safe in some part of an old castle that only we knew about.

  14 Satellites like Sunflowers

  Light coming through the hallway window woke me up. My left cheek was pressed into the carpet and I smelled like cigarettes. Jimmy was moving on the other side of the door. I got up and left before she could find me.

  On the way home I passed a newspaper stand and saw the headlines. My favorite was: CITIZENS FOR A RABID ECONOMY THREATENS SUPERLAND™. A shock of joy hit me just like the night before. Fuck the anniversary! I thought. I’m making a new one. I flung open the door to our house, a victor.

  Annette was in the living room with the shades drawn. Her eyes were dilated from sitting in the dark. She picked up an empty cereal bowl with one hand and raised the blind with the other. Sun came through the window and made the white curtains glow. Her cheeks were red and puffy. She retied her blue satin robe.

  “No one needs this shit right now,” she said. “That baby. I remember his first day of school.”

  Annette had been on the phone with the family of one of the boys who had been shot. She had dated the younger boy’s brother when they were teenagers. Two rivers. The radio in the kitchen was on loud. They were deepening their coverage of the bomb threat at box-mall-church. Would it affect shopping? Annette walked into the kitchen and yanked the plug.

  “Who cares about that damn mall,” she said and went back up into her room.

  Grace wanted everyone out at their place by early afternoon. It soon became clear that we’d be lucky to make it by dinner. Because of the bomb threat and some unrelated concerns about rioting, large sections of the city were cordoned off and there were checkpoints on all the major roads out of town. We followed the traffic advisories all morning. Everything was backed-up. Jimmy called and wanted to know what time she should come.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I said.

  “What time?”

  And my heart, like a sea anemone touched once, curled.

  “Whenever. I’m not in a rush to get there.”

  I was standing on the sidewalk when Jimmy pulled up fresh-faced and rested with a freshly baked vegan pineapple-lemon cake on the seat beside her. Apparently her response to potential riots, bomb threats and dead sisters was to bake and talk about Honduran pottery collectives.

  “I’m really interested in the way cooperative micro-economies…blah, blah, community kiln fire…regional glazing techniques…the hue comes from wood smoke…”

  —Good. We’ll need potshards. That way it’ll be easier for future archeologists to reconstruct our civilization—

  “By the way, I found a book on Honduran geology.”

  She smiled brightly and handed it to me then went on about a friend she had in Tegucigalpa who said he could meet me and how cheap it was to get around now because of all the hurricanes. Through the jungle vine I saw her, Queen of the Jaguars, twirling in a ball gown sewn by harpy eagles and howler monkeys.

  It was after noon before we got on the road. The first checkpoint was easy. We told them we were going shopping and they waved us on. At the second checkpoint they made us kill the engine and show identification. They opened up our cooler and poked around in the ice but that was it.

  Past the security rings, traffic flowed evenly through a colony of gas stations, day labor agencies and fast food drive-thrus on the other side. Kids sold flowers out of white plastic buckets and flagpoles went by like jail bars.

  The original plan was to stay on the phones with Credence and Annette and hook up at a rest area outside of town but the cell reception was already sticky and it didn’t look like that was going to happen. We were out of range before they left.

  Driving through the barricades and idling vehicles of my own deathless Rapture I felt like a kid, back before I knew anything, back when sleeping sunburned in a pup tent or running barefoot through the dewy grass was still reality. That old feeling came and went. Jimmy picked up speed on the interstate and the truck rattled. The speedometer was broken and she could only tell how fast we’re going by sound. On the outskirts of town and buildings, mini-malls and franchises went from a stream to a stutter with flashes of field in between. I rolled down the window. A crop of satellite dishes went by all facing the same way like sunflowers. We passed a warehouse with a thirty-foot spinning cell phone on top of it. After that, it was nothing but grassland.

  I curled up on the vibrating seat with my arm around the pineapple-lemon cake and slept. When Jimmy woke me I thought for a second that I was fourteen and that she was Credence and I’d passed out again.

  “Which exit do I need?”

  “This one.”

  We turned west and the sun cut across Jimmy’s cheek and thigh. Climbing into the wooded foothills the road dipped and curved under a belt of blue sky. We came into a part of the forest that had been logged several times and replanted in rows. The trees were all the same age, each the size of a telephone pole; they made avenues of filtered light, which appeared and disappeared as we drove. On the left was a gravel service road and we took it. A tall thin waterfall and a hazy valley flickered by then there was nothing but trees, green ditches and fallen branches on either side of us. Jimmy hit a pothole and we lurched forward.

&
nbsp; “Go ahead and park,” I said, “let’s go the back way.”

  Jimmy pulled over. I got out the cake and we started walking. Ahead in a clearing was an abandoned cabin that had been wiped out in an avalanche in the 30s. The back half of the roof was caved in and the front door lay rotting in the weeds.

  “Credence and I used to hang out here when we were kids. I’ll show you the cabin. The trail is behind it. ”

  I led her up onto the porch and through the doorway. The floor was covered with dry leaves and when a breeze came they scraped across the pine. I could feel her breath on my shoulder. A strip of light where the roof had caved fell diagonally across the kitchen counter. A forgotten glass bowl sparked in the sun.

  “It’s going to be strange to leave,” Jimmy said. “Are you going to talk to tell them tonight?”

  Intentions blowing everywhere like dandelion seeds.

  “Probably not.”

  “What do you think they’ll say?”

  Through the hole in the roof I saw a hawk dive.

  “See the hawk?”

  She looked up. Her face was half shadowed and half lit. Tiny golden hairs played on upper lip. I slid right behind her while she was watching the hawk, put my mouth to her ear and whispered, “Let’s leave after midnight when they’re all asleep.”

  She thought I was joking but I meant it. Everything was already so messed up.

  We hiked up the trail behind the avalanche cabin. The forest changed as we went. It aged and became dense. Deer’s head orchids and fairy slippers slept all around and soon we could no longer see the cabin or the clearing or the rest of the trail down behind us. The trees grew irregular and roots twisted under our feet. At the top of the ridge the land leveled but was still wet. We walked on a pathway made of 2x8 planks lain over the black sucking mud. Mushrooms and wildflowers lined the soil and grew out of rotting tree trunks. All around rag lichen hung like lace.

  “I’m really looking forward to seeing Grace again,” said Jimmy, almost chipper.

  The house was before us. There was a wind chime on the porch I had never seen. I reached up to touch it and just before I did, Grace opened the door. Her dark hair streaming over her shoulders and down her dress, which was a Mediterranean blue. In her hand she held a spiral notebook and from each strong and facile finger, a tiny creek flowed.

  15 Grace Mountain

  “Della,” she said.

  Her face was inches from mine and I could smell her skin. She had cocoa butter on her lips. When she kissed me I felt the print. She touched my head.

  “And Jimmy,” she shifted and her eyes turned yellow in the sun. “It’s wonderful to have you here.”

  I saw Jimmy on the edge of a circling current.

  “Miro will be back soon. Annette called. They just left.”

  “They were giving him a hard time about taking the day off,” I said.

  “Oh, whatever,” Grace laughed, taking Jimmy’s hand. “That union wants to be a vanguard so bad it just keeps leaching the life out of people.”

  She passed through the front door and, once through, let Jimmy’s hand drop. She pulled a rubber band off the back of the knob and put her hair in a loose ponytail, tobacco brown strands playing by her cheeks.

  “I mean they’re willing to create a dialogue on class but…”

  We walked into the kitchen and Grace stepped into a flood of sunlight. Leaning against the butcher’s block counter, she unbuttoned the top of her blue dress and pulled the rubber band back out of her hair. A plane scratched a path in the sky and she watched it through the window then threw her head forward and shook her hair which, streaked with copper, cascaded around her ears until she wound it back into a ponytail and stood up. Her face was flushed and there was sweat on her forehead and under her eyes.

  “They’re too orchestrated. Too mired in Party structure.”

  She wiped her temple with the inside of her wrist and smiled.

  “Jimmy, Credence tells me you’re going to Honduras.”

  “Come see the garden,” I said.

  Grace uncorked the wine, “Where is it you’re going?”

  I grabbed Jimmy’s hand.

  Jimmy yanked her hand back and settled in. Clearly, she thought this was an opportunity to soften Grace up on the subject of expatriatism. But Grace doesn’t soften.

  “I’m flying into Tegucigalpa then on to the mountains.”

  Grace handed her a glass of white wine.

  “Really? What made you decide to leave?”

  “Well, I don’t feel like there’s much more I can do here and I don’t really want to be a part of what’s going on.”

  Grace brushed hair out of her face, paused, and then wiped the sink. When there was no response Jimmy went on, chattering about native cultures, indigenous medicine and artisan craft movements. And, maybe because it was the anniversary, or maybe because Jimmy’s gay, I don’t know, either way, Jimmy got a pass. I saw Grace make that decision. The faintest exhale, the smallest movement of an eyelid. Jimmy saw nothing and yet Grace watched her as if she were a pretty tangerine bird, waiting for her to finish, all the time with her flaming eyes dancing over the feathers until they caught fire.

  “So then you won’t be staying for the rise of the proletariat?” she said when Jimmy was done.

  Jimmy laughed, “I’d only be cooking for rich white people anyway.”

  “You could always industrialize,” she refilled Jimmy’s wine glass. “You know, get a job stunning chickens in a factory to earn the trust of the working class.”

  Jimmy laughed again and accidentally spat Chablis on my legs.

  “It’s a pretty silly idea, isn’t it?” said Grace, getting a rag. “Leaping out of the closet in a crisis?” She lowered her voice, “Don’t worry, sir. I’m a revolutionary socialist. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  Jimmy covered her mouth with her arm so she wouldn’t spit on me again. Grace smiled. That’s how I love her. My fearless Grace, my Broken Shield.

  “Anyway, it’s stupid. Who is going to run the healthcare system if everyone’s picking grapes or on a tractor?”

  She hung the rag over the faucet.

  “That’s why, in the end, I always thought what Della did was smart. Deciding to stay in school.”

  “Yes,” I said, “because everybody needs an invertebrate paleontologist on the inside when the time comes.”

  Grace looked at me and I felt like she could see it all—the box-mall-church, the ticket in my pocket, even the seeds of new ideas that I couldn’t yet see myself.

  “I thought that went well,” Jimmy said later. “I think she’ll understand.”

  “Watch your head.”

  We were climbing the ladder into the attic. Grace waited below.

  “Don’t forget the Rainbow Brite dolls!”

  I pointed to a stack of boxes in the corner.

  “They’re behind that.”

  Grace keeps all of Cady’s things in a crib so that no one ever forgets to whom she really belonged. Stuffed rabbits, snap-on black leather bracelets with metal studs, half-used hair dye—Enchanted Forest and Electric Lava—black nail polish, a plastic record player, Mutant Ninja Turtle stickers, jewelry boxes, candles, incense, a Bauhaus poster, a walkman, cassettes. If you glued it all together it wouldn’t look like Cady, though. Like when you look at fossils and think the world must have been nothing but seashells but it wasn’t. It was filled with all sorts of things that didn’t preserve.

  “What’s going to happen now?” Jimmy asked.

  “We’ll put some of Cady’s stuff up, play her music. Make some toasts. We’ll be out of here by midnight. I promise.”

  From the rafters, dried Indian corn hung.

  “When we were little we used to play Battle of Wounded Knee,” I handed Jimmy a box. “I never got to be a warrior, though. Cady and Credence were always the warriors and I got stuck being one of the babies left to die on the hillside.”

  Cady would make speeches of vengeance over my
body and Credence would draw plans for a counterattack. If I moved, Cady would kick me. Hard. I broke some ribs once doing fieldwork at grad school and what struck me was how familiar the feeling was. I remember thinking it was lucky Cady didn’t puncture a lung ’cause if I’d ratted her out she would have had me shot. That’s how it was. We were all in training.

  Through the window I saw Credence and Annette walking up the path.

  “We should probably just take the whole thing downstairs,” I said.

  We dragged the crib into the dining room. Grace set out chips and guacamole while Credence and Annette caught her up on the shootings. Riots had started and were getting worse. Organizers were holed up at Higher Ground of Africa Baptist negotiating with the city and that’s why Credence was late. He’d been trying to get the unions to pressure the mayor but the unions were trying to get the mayor reelected and didn’t want him chastised over police accountability. Community leaders split—What solution was to be had? What mystical action could convey both rage and passivity? Candlelight vigil! Credence was trying to act excited but Annette’s disgust was clear.

  “Those boys were fourteen and sixteen years old. That baby was holding a goddamned robot toy when they shot him.”

  Just then Miro came in. The lost fish of the Morava, he swam muscled and aging, his scales like silver coins fell and glinted between the rocks. Something was wrong. His frayed fins beat the water. He laid a newspaper down in front of Grace. “They’re tightening the borders. Soon people aren’t just going to be able to leave.”

  Grace glanced at headlines then poured some salsa into a bowl.

  “Sounds like you’re going to get out just in time, Jimmy,” she said.

  I could feel Jimmy’s eyes boring a hole in the side of my skull.

  Annette asked her to help out in the kitchen.

  Grace flipped through the newspaper.

  “Let’s get the stuff up,” said Credence and walked into the living room.