Love in the Time of Global Warming (15 page)

“Mommy!” I fall down next to the table, my face crumpling with the force of the realization, unable to contain the emotion any longer. “Mommy!”

“Penelope?” She is crying but her mouth is still the same. The mouth that kissed good night, whispering “I love you, I love you,” so many times I couldn’t count. And it didn’t matter because there were always more I love you’s until there weren’t.

“Can you get up? I’m taking you with us,” I say. “These are my friends. They’ll help.”

She smiles at them. “Beautiful, all of you,” she says. “So beautiful in this dark place.”

“Can we carry you?”

She shakes her head no. “I can’t leave here, darling. Didn’t they explain?”

We lift her from the table; she’s so light I could carry her by myself but I don’t want to. She feels like she’d break into little pieces if I dropped her. Her hands are around my neck and she looks into my face, her voice as dry as her chapped lips. “Look at your eyes.”

She doesn’t say anything about my tresses being gone but her hands reach for my skull and I let her stroke the short, stiff hairs.

I remember how we never stopped cuddling, kissing each other on the lips, even when I was an angry thirteen-year-old, fighting with her every day, running barefoot into the street saying I was going to find another family to live with. And that night we were in my bed together while she smoothed my hair and warmed my asphalt-pocked soles on her calves until I fell asleep.

“What happened, Mommy?” I ask. “What happened that day?”

Her lips tremble and thin to lines. “There was so much water.… But somehow, it didn’t touch us. I don’t know how. But your father…” She stops speaking and her eyes fill with tears again, her mouth falls open, wordless.

Daddy.
With his wild hair, high forehead, the horn-rim glasses balanced on his long nose. The surfing scientist. He loved the sea, had chosen to live by the sea. How could the sea have taken him? But she said,
It didn’t touch
us.
She and Venice had been saved somehow.

My father’s ghost fades from my mind and I see my brother standing there in his place.

“Where’s Venice? Mom?”

Her hands grip tighter, stronger than you’d expect. She shakes her head and her mouth wrinkles in on itself like the little apple-head dolls we used to make in another life. “I don’t know. I don’t know what he did to him.…”

My throat is full of ash. “Who?”

“The man brought me. He knew of you. He was looking for you.”

“What man?” I ask, already guessing the answer. There is only one man I know of who is looking for me.

“Kronen.”

Hex touches me with his shoulder so I can feel the heat coming through his shirt. Kronen. Father of the Giants.

“How did he know you were my mother?”

She looks around the room, then whispers so I have to lean closer. “The walls have ears. And sight.”

I think of the people at the Lotus Hotel, the sirens, Beatrix, even Tara, but I can’t believe she would have harmed us.

“He was angry at us before. At your father. They worked together and your father didn’t like the experiments he was doing. When your dad tried to expose it, his life was threatened, Penelope. We were all in danger, even Then, of more than just losing our home. I should have believed your dad.” Her voice is low, confused, and mournful sounding. She reminds me of a homeless person, mumbling to herself on the street.

“You mustn’t let him find you.” Her hands dart up to my face, worrying the air around me as if trying to cast a spell of protection. I lean down to kiss her cheek, skin pale and dry and papery, crinkling over sharp bone.

And then I’m startled out of this dreamlike moment.

“It’s Pen, the Giant-blinder,” says a voice.

I turn to see a man, not much taller than I am. “Where are you going?” He speaks with a calm that is worse than if he had raised his voice.

“Leaving,” I say. I try to sound bold but I know it’s a pathetic attempt.

The man pats his goatee with his small, neat hand. “Oh no, it’s not that simple. You blinded Bull, whom I created myself. One of my first two children, the ones who started it all. My baby. Haven’t you heard the expression an eye for an eye?” His own eyes roll up, surveying the ceiling as he turns his hooked profile to us.

Hex steps forward with his sword drawn but then something comes out of the shadows and it is Bull, the Giant I blinded. He sniffs the air like a massive dog. The empty sockets gaping in his head reminding me of what I have done. I put my hand on Hex and pull him back.

“You must give me something in exchange for her,” the man says, still not looking at us. His voice is soft, almost a lisp with his tongue.

“What do you want?”

“Fuck you,” Ez says.

We all look at him. He is standing shoulder to shoulder with Hex and I realize that Ez is quite a bit taller; I’ve never really thought about it before because Hex is the tougher of the two. Ez looks as ready to fight as Hex, and I wonder how this has happened.

Bull—one of Kronen’s living weapons—shifts his weight. A small Egyptian statue falls from an alcove and crumbles on the floor.

“No,” I say. “It’s okay. Let him talk.”

“An eye for an eye.” Kronen is still fascinated by the ceiling, still petting the strip of hair on his chin like it’s a small animal. Then he looks at me for the first time. “I want your eye,” he says softly.

“What the hell. He’s insane,” Hex says. “Fuckin’ worse than I thought, man.”

But I don’t care about anything except helping my mother now.

“Give me my mother and you may have my left eye,” I say.

Ash and Ez and Hex all put their hands on me at once.

“Give me the eye first,” Kronen says. “Or I’ll have Bull take care of it.”

“No, Pen,” Ez says, interlacing his fingers with mine so I can feel the flow of his blood. “No!”

I turn to look at him, then at Ash and Hex. “I can’t let go of her again.” I want to sob but my voice is very calm.

A low growl burbellows in Bull’s throat.

My mother has closed her eyes. The bones of her face jut out. She doesn’t have much time left down here.

“Penelope, my hands are so cold,” my mother says. “My hands are so cold. Won’t you warm them?”

“Wait, Mommy. Hold on. Soon. I’ll be back, I promise.”

“It’s too late,” says Hex softly. “She won’t make it.”

I push my friends off of me and go toward the man. “Take my eye,” I say. “I have another.”

Before they can step forward, the earth shakes with the now familiar rumbles. The other Giants have come out of their stupor. They emerge from all sides, hulking over us, sniffing the air, waving their hands, blood red in the candlelight.

I know then that my eye is not enough, that my friends and I are going to lose no matter what. We are going to lose everything.

20

THE SEER

A
SH WAS AWARE
that it was more likely that his beauty would save him than his intelligence, which he had been told was negligible, or even his musical talents, which no one except his choral director, Luther, seemed to notice. Even the choral director was more interested in Ash’s looks, anyway. The coveted lighter-than-a-paper-bag brown skin, “good” nose, and almond green eyes with teasable “girly” eyelashes, the tall, broad-shouldered, naturally muscular body.

“You should be a model,” the choral director told Ash, instead of,
You should be a professional singer. A musician.
The choral director watched Ash all the time so that it made Ash uncomfortable, but he liked the idea of being a model someday. He thought he could do a pretty good job because he had a strong imagination (for which he was often chastised by his mother), and he had observed that the best models seemed to be able to transport themselves to other places. He could do this. He could fly in his mind. Especially when he was singing.

When Ash’s mother came home from work early and found him at the one-bedroom apartment, cutting school, smoking weed, singing and playing piano for a handsome, dark-skinned boy named Darel White, she began smashing Ash’s piano—the one his choral director had given him, his most precious possession, the only item he owned that made him feel like he was home. Then she called him a stupid fag and threw him out.

Ash stayed with Darel White for a few nights until his family became suspicious and asked Ash to leave. He went to the home of the choral director who lived alone in the better part of town. Luther showed his big teeth when he saw Ash on his doorstep and invited him in. That was the first time Ash was really grateful, and also ashamed, of his “good” features and lighter-than-a-paper-bag brown skin. He stayed with Luther until the night he came into Ash’s bedroom. Ash went to a shelter where he lived until he landed his first modeling gig with a well-known men’s magazine. Although he had been imagining it all his life, on his first photo shoot, the world ended and Ash actually flew away.

*   *   *

Ez was named after Ezra Pound and Eliot after T. S. Eliot, two great modernist poets. Their parents were English professors and poets so it made sense. Red-haired twins with the coloring of their Irish mother, Sean, and their Russian-Jewish father Mark’s elegant bone structure. Sometimes, when he was older and had studied his namesake, Ezra wished his parents had chosen a different name because, while Ezra Pound was undoubtedly a brilliant poet, he was also known for being, in later life, a fascist and a madman.

In their white-walled, sun-washed bedroom in their rather grand, Spanish-style house that late spring morning, fourteen-year-old Ez had asked fourteen-year-old Eliot if he could tell him something. They were standing beside each other in front of the oak-framed mirror, getting ready to go to the private Westside school where Eliot excelled in sports and academics and Ez daydreamed and compulsively sketched male nudes in every class in spite of the danger of being found out. Two such different, yet identical, boys in the school uniform of white button-down shirts and dark trousers. Ez wore a red tie, though it was not required. His hair was longer and in its natural curly state while Eliot slicked his back. This was their morning ritual, surveying themselves side by side in the mirror before they left for school. They had done it since they were very young. It was still fascinating to them that they looked so alike and yet so different. Sometimes Ez stared into this mirror alone, thinking,
I hate you. What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you just go away?

Ez hadn’t planned on telling his brother on this morning of this day. But somehow, staring into the mirror at the two of them, he felt compelled. That was a trait of his—compulsion. It was why he couldn’t stop drawing, even when it put him in danger academically or, more significantly, socially when it was pictures of male nudes. It was why he ate too much sugar. He couldn’t help it though he knew all about nutrition and even at fourteen could cook better and healthier meals than anyone in his house. He had introduced Eliot to superfoods, which seemed to have enhanced his athletic skills even more. But often, after making a meal of mung bean stew and kale salad for his family, Ez snuck off to consume a carton of rain forest–flavored ice cream, or two.

“You know, I’m gay,” Ez said to Eliot’s reflection in the mirror.

Eliot didn’t blink an eye. “I know that, Ez,” he gently replied.

“You do?”

“Uh-huh. I think most people do.”

“Mom and Dad?”

“I think so, yeah.”

“Oh.”

Eliot turned to face Ez so Eliot’s handsome profile was reflected in the mirror. “Those drawings of nude guys? Kind of gives it away. Really well done, by the way.”

“Oh, yeah,” Ez said. “Those.”

They began to laugh, giggles at first, that turned into guffaws and then, finally, unmistakable and perfectly identical snorts. Their mother had to come knocking on the door to tell them they would be late for school.

*   *   *

The girl’s name was Yxta. She told Alexandria that it meant princess. Alexandria thought she looked like one. A girl from a fairy tale with long white-blond braids, firefly eyes, and a soft, wan face. Even the shirt she wore was princesslike, all pink and sparkles. Alexandria had a closet full of shirts like that, most of them covered with pink sparkling hearts, and she refused to wear any of them.

Alexandria told Yxta, “Call me Lex.”

Yxta and Lex. She liked the sound of their names together. The X’s.

The night before Yxta came over for the first playdate Lex was so excited she hardly slept and she chewed her fingernails although her mother had made her promise she would stop that “filthy habit.”

Yxta and Lex walked to Lex’s big yellow and white house with the rose garden. It was just down the street from the school but Lex wasn’t sure Yxta’s parents would have been okay with the girls walking home alone. They had probably assumed Lex’s parents or nanny walked with them but the nanny was at home, cleaning, and Lex’s parents were gone, as usual. Still, Lex felt sure she could protect Yxta if a stranger bothered them.

When they got to Lex’s house, the girls went upstairs to her room. It was decorated all in pink. Lex hated this but her mother had insisted. For once, though, she was glad because Yxta was delighted.

“It’s a princess room!” Yxta exclaimed.

Lex shrugged. “If it was yours it would be. I’m more of a dragon.”

Yxta picked up the abalone-shell-inlaid brush and looked at her friend. Lex’s hair was thick, wavy, and long, although she had begged her mom to let her cut it. “I can make you into a princess, too,” Yxta said. “You’re so pretty.”

Usually Lex did not want to look pretty but this made her stomach swirl pleasantly. She let Yxta brush the tangles from her hair and even paint her fingernails bright watermelon pink with the nail polish her mother had bought her. Even though Lex didn’t like the nail polish because it smelled bad and gave her a headache, she opened the windows and didn’t complain. Yxta looked so serious, her brow furrowed in concentration and her miniature fingers skillfully applying the polish to Lex’s ragged, dirty fingernails. The citrus trees in the yard and the chlorine from the pool made the room smell like summer, which it almost was.