Some Possible Solutions (20 page)

“Oh, no problem,” I say, annoyed with myself for how grateful I feel that he's playing it as though he's inconvenienced me rather than the reverse.

Then it's his eye at the hole. His eye upon the deteriorating brick, the row of trash cans swollen with garbage, Lulu's hand-me-down scooter chained to the communal bike rack. The eye lingers.

“Hey, screw you!” I say.

The eye doesn't react. Had I whispered it too softly for him to hear? Had I said it at all?

“Say, neighbor,” Steve Stanhope says. “My wife gave birth to a baby girl last night, and I'd love to give you a little something as a kind of celebratory gift, because, well, there's nothing like having a baby girl.”

As if I don't know.

“Sort of like the way I'd've given you a cigar back in the day, you know?”

“Okay,” I say.

“Just a sec,” he says. And even though I don't want anything from Steve Stanhope, I stay there at the peephole, waiting. Maybe if he hadn't said “Say,” I might not have stayed. But it's a tic of mine too sometimes, to say “Say.”

I'm keeping an eye on the peephole when suddenly I sense a flutter at the top of my head, like a bird just pooped on my hair. I look up to find the tiniest drone I've ever seen hovering above me. The drone beeps and drops something small onto the concrete beside me.

“Hey, pick it up,” Steve Stanhope requests. I bend down to retrieve the object. It's a perfectly round pebble, pure white, like the moon of my boyhood. “You can plant it between the cracks in concrete. It'll grow wherever.”

“Ste-eve!” Mara sings out across the lawn. “Ste-eve!”

“Gotta run.” The eye winks. “Enjoy, okay? Nice chatting with you. And don't worry, the hole will be repaired any day now.”

“Does it need water?” I remember to ask only once he's out of earshot.

*   *   *

“You can do
it!” I say to Lulu. Dusk on Saturday, and we're standing above the seam between two slabs of concrete in the enclosure behind the building. Sarah refused to come outside.

“A weird random magic pebble seed thingy?” Sarah had said, scrubbing hard at the nonorganic apples in the sink. “From Steve
Stanhope
? No thanks.”

“It's a gift,” I countered. “From a neighbor.”

“Isn't he the one who put those radioactive fish in the canal to eat the other even more radioactive fish?”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” I lied.

“Well don't let Lulu touch it,” she said.

Now, as we stand at the back of the building, I drop the seed into Lulu's palm.

“It's cold!” she gasps.

“Looks like the moon, right?” I say. “I mean, that's what the moon used to look like.”

“Okay,” she says.

Okay.

“So,” I say. “Plant it.”

“Where?” She looks around the concrete enclosure. “Is there some dirt?”

“Well actually,” I explain, “this is a special kind of seed. It doesn't need even the teensiest bit of dirt.”

“Okay,” she says again. Sometimes I worry about Lulu. She doesn't seem like a child at all. She never uses words like “teensiest.”

“So all you have to do is just plant it right here between these pieces of concrete. See?” I stroke the seam with the tip of my sneaker. I've never seen anything green in our backyard, not even weeds poking up between the cracks.

“So, I should plant it?” she says. “Like, put it here?”

Carefully, she places the seed on the seam.

“Well,” I say, trying to pull my mood up by my own bootstraps, “is that where you want your plant to grow? You have to think these things through.”

“Well,” Lulu says, “I guess someone might step on it when they were taking their trash out. So maybe we should—put it somewhere else?”

I get the distinct feeling that she's humoring me. Lulu is so good at love. I'm the oldest in our household, followed by Sarah and then Lulu. But in terms of souls, Lulu's the oldest and I'm the youngest.

“
Plant
it somewhere else,” I correct her.

“Yeah,” she says.

“You decide.” I pluck the seed off the ground and place it in her palm again.

She walks around the concrete enclosure, cupping the seed, examining all the seams. It takes her about forty-five seconds. We're talking six feet by ten feet, max. A siren wails by on the street and—absentmindedly, accurately, the way I used to hum along when a familiar song came on the radio—Lulu imitates its howl under her breath.

Then she stops and plants the seed between two slabs. By “plants” I mean she shoves the pebble as far as it can be shoved into the crack.

On the other side of the wall, the Stanhopes' generator hums maddeningly. I wonder if we reap any benefit from living so near it.

“Fun, huh?” I say as she stands up. I'm expecting her to be polite and accommodating when she glances at me, enthusiastic for my sake.

But there's an actual glow in her eyes, the delight moving slow and stately across her face.

She says, “I should water it, right?”

Bingo.

*   *   *

“No,” Sarah whispers.
I'm holding her, spooning her from behind on the bed. Tomorrow will be Monday. “It's not right. I just think—I just think kids now. I mean, our kids. The kids of people like us. They face—they face a lot of—they don't have—the world—the schools—a lot of disappointment, you know? On a daily basis, right? Like, I heard of a boy who got a ticket for drawing a chalk dragon on the sidewalk. Her school doesn't own a single microscope, okay? So I just don't think—”

“It's too late,” I whisper back. “She planted the seed. She watered the seed.”

“It's not a seed,” Sarah hisses.

“Be that as it may,” I say serenely.

“‘Be that as it may'!” Sarah whisper-yells. “Are you stupid? Seriously, sometimes I seriously think you are stupid.”

“She can hear us maybe, you know,” I say. Because if Lulu is awake, which hopefully she isn't, but if she is, she can hear us even over WaveMaker. That's how thin the walls are.

*   *   *

On Tuesday evening,
the temperature is forty-five degrees higher when I leave my office building than when I entered it in the morning.

“Feels like end times, huh?” a janitor says, laughing as I pass him on my way out to the street.

“Sure thing,” I say to be nice, but then my words stick with me all the way down into the subway.
Sure thing sure thing sure thing sure thing
.

“Where's Lulu?” I ask Sarah the second I step through the door. It had been a long bad day. I'd spent nine hours feeling like my computer was an eye disapproving of my every action.

“Out back,” Sarah replies, scrubbing rutabaga in the sink. I can feel her blaming me.

I throw my bag down and run out the door.

There she is, staring at the crack in the concrete. She looks up at me and the day falls away from my shoulders.

“Hey kiddo,” I say.

“It disappeared!” she announces like it's good news.

So the seed is gone. So a rabid squirrel squirreled it away, or the super finally got around to sweeping up.

“I can't see it anymore!” Lulu says. “It must've sunk down to put in its roots!”

I've always thought Lulu is more like Sarah in temperament. Darker, tending toward pessimism. But now it occurs to me (with horror) that maybe Lulu is more like me. Relentlessly optimistic.

“Well well well,” I say, far more accustomed to Lulu's solemnity than to her glee. “How about that. Let's go in and have some dinner, okay?”

“Aren't you glad, Daddy?” she says.

“Oh,” I say, feeling sad. “I am so glad.”

“Thank you for the seed.” Lulu gazes down at the crack in the concrete. “I gave it a few more drops of water. Is that okay?”

She's wearing her blue school uniform. The humidity frizzes her hair and shines her skin. Sometimes she looks so wonderful I have to shut my eyes.

I say, “Let's go see what Mom came up with for dinner.”

Inside, Sarah has set the table with cloth napkins. She's lit a candle. Sarah is the kind of person who can create something out of nothing, a skill that's coming in more and more handy. Cleverly, she sautés rutabaga leaves with garlic. She roasts the flesh with oil and Italian seasoning and calls it rutabaga gnocchi, and sure, the chunks of it are not entirely unlike gnocchi.

I have this trick where I flick my fingers against the side of my taut cheek to make a sound like a drop of water falling into a body of water. It's a refreshing sound, and Lulu loves it. Given the hotness of the night, I make the drop-of-water sound a bunch of times as we sit down to dinner.

Lulu claps. Sarah rolls her eyes.

“Ugh, stop it,” she says. “That sound depresses me.”

“Why?” Lulu demands.

“Reminds me of the drought.”

“Well it reminds me of the rain!” Lulu says.

Parenthood is underrated, because there's no way to talk about it. How can these chemicals and minerals, the chemicals and minerals of Lulu, add up to this?

*   *   *

We try to
be good parents. We try to foster compassion, independence, thriftiness. We permit Lulu to go by herself down the street to the bodega. We give her an allowance if she makes her bed every day. We let her hang out with Mason Mitchell, the unpleasant boy on the third floor whose parents don't care if he plays video games all day and whose home doesn't contain a single print book. We try to not freak out when Mason's mother gives them Mountain Dew for dinner. A kid needs friends, especially an only child.

But sometimes I don't think we're doing it right. It feels, at times, impossible. I've come upon Lulu browsing the Internet, staring silently at pictures of starving children and people drowned in tsunamis. I've watched her watch a video billboard screening a liquor ad in which seven almost naked women dance around a man in a tuxedo.

Sarah is strong but sometimes at night she's been known to weep.
We're all she has, and we're not enough.

Yet on Thursday evening, when Lulu meets me at the front door of the apartment building, jumping up and down, grabbing my hand, yanking me along toward the back door, it feels like we are doing something right.

Bless Steve Stanhope. Because there's a half-centimeter chunk of glittery white matter emerging from the crack in the concrete. Before I can bend down to examine it more closely, Lulu flings herself into my arms as she hasn't since she was a toddler. That's the thing, you hold your kids less and less with each passing day until one day you hardly get to touch them at all.

Sarah refuses to come outside and look at the growing thing. She barely glances at our glowing faces.

“I'm sure it's great,” she says.

I head to the kitchen for a glass of cold water. I like to drink cold water when I'm annoyed. Put out the fire. My hand is on the tap when Sarah calls from the other room, “Contaminated!”

“What?” I snap.

“They put out the announcement an hour ago.”

I grunt in her direction, as though it's her fault.

“Only for forty-eight hours. There's a gallon of bottled in the fridge. We can boil more too.”

“But it's so hot in here already,” I say.

Lulu and Sarah are silent in the other room.

“Thank you,” I say, ashamed of myself, and open the fridge.

*   *   *

The night turns
out just great, though. We have rutabaga with brown sugar and allspice for dessert. Lulu and I go out to check on the growing thing after dinner and it's still there, a small sparkle in the dark. The Stanhopes' generator purrs away on the other side of the wall. And though I can hear the twins splashing in the pool, the moist noise seeping through the peephole, Lulu doesn't seem to notice—she's never been in a pool, so maybe the sound doesn't even register. We come back inside and boil a bunch of water and hang out and read print books and Lulu falls asleep smiling.

Then we turn on WaveMaker, and the apartment takes on that special hush, and Sarah pulls out the CockFrolick and steps out of her work dress and skin is still skin, you know?

*   *   *

“No respite,” Sarah
says at two in the morning.

What's driving her crazy is the noise from the upstairs neighbors, who stream violent movies all night long.

I get up and go into the bathroom and buy a campfire app. I return to bed, a fire flickering on the screen of my phone, the sound of crickets and crackling sap joining the WaveMaker in the battle against the sound effects. I place the phone beside her on the pillow and swipe the volume up to its maximum level. The audio is fantastic. I can practically smell the wood smoke.

“Turn that off,” Sarah says.

“It's working!”

“No,” she says.

When I listen hard, I can still hear the movie raging upstairs, and maybe it's almost worse, listening for that beneath the sound of the campfire. But I don't pause the app.

“Please,” she says. “Seriously, it sucks. Don't you think it sucks?”

“I think it's good,” I say.

“That's depressing,” she says, rolling away from me.

I pause the app. I consider and reject the possibility of proposing a nighttime stroll. We do that sometimes, when we both can't sleep, use Google maps to take a walk on a Greek isle or through a Peruvian village. We hold hands while one of us scrolls.

Sarah rolls back toward me, apologetic.

“You know what I hate?” she says. “Those screen savers at work that show one gorgeous nature scene after another.”

A siren down the block launches its long wail. We lie there listening.

“Remember Lulu dancing naked in front of the mirror when she was two, wearing all your necklaces?” I say.