Love in the Time of Global Warming (19 page)

“Yes. But she’ll come back,” I say, not knowing why the words come out like that.

“How?”

“I don’t know. But she will.”

I remember how Venice used to believe in Santa and the Easter Bunny. Even when it was obvious that our mom and dad stuffed the stockings, ate the cookies, drank the milk, hid the jellybean-filled plastic eggs. I was always trying to catch them at it when I was younger, but Venice never questioned them, or if he did, he always accepted their silly answers (
Why did the Easter Bunny use eggs from our garage? He has the same ones, sweetie!
), his eyes flooded with wonder then, instead of sorrow. He wanted to believe.

In the same way, Venice nods now and when I look into his eyes I believe what I’ve said even more. I believe in death and destruction now, but also in magic. For I have seen all of it.

We bury the bones with the seeds in the earth, and water them from the spring, adding a few drops from Tara’s glass vials. I wish, along with the plants, that my friends would grow up out of this earth in the night. As a benediction I recite some lines I remember from
The Odyssey
when Odysseus returns and gets his father, Laertes, to recognize him.

“… We went among the trees, and you named them all and told me what each one was, and you gave me thirteen pear trees, and ten apple trees, and forty fig trees; and so also you named the fifty vines you would give. Each of them bore regularly, for these were grapes at every stage upon them, whenever the seasons of Zeus came down from the sky upon them, to make them heavy.”

Venice and I go inside and share a can of fruit cocktail that Merk left with my supplies on the porch. We split a can of tuna with Argos. Then we all lie down on the mattress and I sing a song my mother used to sing to me as a lullaby; it’s called “Little Green.” Venice falls asleep.

*   *   *

Venice has always had a better sense of time than I do. I gave up trying to mark the days after the loss of my eye but my brother’s kept a careful record since the Earth Shaker, except for the time he was being driven to our house. According to his estimate, it’s the first day of the month of May.

In the morning I try to make this half-dream state last, imagining the two of us sitting at the wooden table with my mother and father, Moira and Noey, Ez and Ash and Hex. Argos is poised on his haunches begging for food or lying on his back, tapping his front paws together like a seal in a circus while Moira rubs his belly with her bare foot. Venice is building a tower out of Legos and beside him sits Ez who is helping make it into a skyscraper by adding layers of figures holding hands. My dad is telling Noey about the vegetables he picked for the salad, how the cucumbers are wrinkled looking but very sweet. There are other foods, too, maybe yam and sage gnocchi or Indonesian lemongrass enchiladas.

Ash is asking my mom what’s in the butternut squash soup.

“Just vegetables,” she says. “Squash, carrots, yams, onion, and a bit of olive oil. The secret is to blend it!”

Hex is next to me, his bony knee wearing through the fabric of his black jeans and touching mine under the table. After dinner we’re going to read
The Odyssey
together under the swirled glass amber and blue shade of the antique Tiffany lamp. Then we’ll climb up the stairs to my attic room, get in bed under the old master prints, and kiss ourselves into oblivion, but only until morning. Then we will come back to the world.

I close my eyes again.

Now it is just me and Venice and Argos but perhaps someday Hex and Ez and Ash will come to join us here. If I have found my gray-eyed brother among all this devastation, anything can happen.

Something stirs against my face like fallen petals in a warm desert breeze. Orange butterflies have flown back into the room. They circle my head and then move to the window. I get up from the mattress and go to the spiderweb-patterned glass; I look out at the garden and see, among the brown and gray, something green.

Calling for Venice to follow, I run downstairs and out the front door where I fall to my knees, Argos beside me, wetly nosing my arm. Green shoots are pushing forth from the earth. Shy and sly and fresh. And I realize, things grow here. Impossibly (though what is impossible or possible anymore?) this is a place where things grow. Venice kneels, too, and puts out his hand to touch the fragile seedlings. He looks at me, trying not to show his teeth in a smile, head slightly cocked to the side, the way Argos sometimes does.

“Is it magic?”

“Yes,” I say. “Real magic. Life.”

Then Argos pushes up off his haunches, stands poised and quivering on his short legs, looking toward the horizon, as his nose savors the air. His tail is wig-wagging back and forth like a flag.

“Penelope?” Venice says.

I look, too, squinting with my single eye to bring the image into focus. Three figures are approaching us through the fog. A tall one with brown dreadlocks, a redhead, and a slight person with a shock of black hair as dark as the ink of the tattoos that tell his story. They stop for a moment. Then they run through the wasted land with outstretched arms, toward the pink house, toward us.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book could not have been written without the input, help, and inspiration of my assistant and friend, Jeni McKenna. I am grateful to the wonderful Christy Ottaviano for her impeccable editing skills and her support, to her Holt team: Amy Allen, George Wen, April Ward, and to Neil Swaab for the cover art, and to my brilliant agent, Laurie Liss at Sterling Lord Literistic. Rand Paulin and Jeni McKenna helped with the scientific research regarding cloning. The term “girlist” is borrowed from Leah Case as are some of Noey’s photos. Hex’s tattoo phrase appears in my favorite book,
House of Leaves
, by Mark Z. Danielewski. Oh, and thanks to Homer, of course!

Francesca Lia Block
, winner of the prestigious Margaret A. Edwards Lifetime Achievement Award, is the author of many acclaimed and best-selling books, including
Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books
;
Roses and Bones: Myths, Tales, and Secrets
; and the adult novel
The Elementals
. Her work is published around the world. You can visit her on the web at
francescaliablock.com
.

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Copyright © 2013 by Francesca Lia Block.

All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Block, Francesca Lia.

Love in the time of global warming / Francesca Lia Block.—First edition.

pages        cm

“Christy Ottaviano Books.”

Summary: After a devastating earthquake destroys the West Coast, causing seventeen-year-old Penelope to lose her home, her parents, and her ten-year-old brother, she navigates a dark world, holding hope and love in her hands and refusing to be defeated.

ISBN 978-0-8050-9627-9 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-0-8050-9902-7 (e-book)

[1.  Survival—Fiction.   2.  Families—Fiction.   3.  Love—Fiction.   4.  Voyages and travels—Fiction.   5.  Earthquakes—Fiction.   6.  Los Angeles (Calif.)—Fiction.   7.  Science fiction.]   I.  Title.

PZ7.B61945Lo 2013     [Fic]—dc23          2012047808

First Edition—2013

eISBN 9780805099027