The Green Man Page 16

  “Not every minute?” said Hugo.

  She laughed. “Not every second?”

  Lucia, among the roses, among the lilies and the gladiolas, spent many years listening to the ghosts of the Disappeared. She told their histories in lace and tossed the finished pieces into the sky for the birds to paint with their bodies. Hugo invented a violin music that shaped the air into tunnels for the birds to swoop through. It was a time of stories, and of memories putting the flesh back onto bones. Who could dream of sailing away? The Grafter freely offered bouquets from his enormous green face. And the world painted by birds made both the living and the dead feel joy to come from such an earth.

  Katherine Vaz is the author of Saudade, a selection in the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers series, and Mariana, translated into six languages and selected by the U.S. Library of Congress as one of the Top Thirty International Books of 1998. Her collection Fado & Other Stories won the 1997 Drue Heinz Literature Prize.

  Her short fiction has appeared in numerous literary quarterlies, and she occasionally reviews for The Boston Globe. “The Kingdom of Melting Glances,” her first children’s story, was published in A Wolf at the Door, another anthology edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. Vaz’s fiction often draws upon the author’s Portugese-American background.

  Author’s Note:

  My father’s family is from the island of Terceira in the Azores, and he told me about a famous legend from the biggest of the islands, São Miguel: One day a shepherd with blue eyes was told he could not marry the princess he loved. She loved him, too. She came to him weeping so terribly that she cried a green lake out of her green eyes. He cried a blue lake out of his blue eyes, and they each jumped into the lake made out of the other’s tears and disappeared. Those two lakes, brilliant green and brilliant blue, side by side, are still visible today on the island of São Miguel, often covered with a sea fog that makes the story seem completely alive and mysterious. The “Grafter” figure is my tribute to the incredible gardeners of the Azores, who put together plants so magically.

  I have made an entirely new story out of those details.

  Grounded

  Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  My mom spends a lot of time with dying people. She’s a hospice nurse.

  She’s had this job my whole life. It used to scare me—maybe because I knew it scared Dad. Maybe that’s one of the reasons he left. If you watch people die every day, doesn’t it depress you? Do you look at everyone you meet and imagine their death?

  Two years ago, when I was twelve, Mom took me with her to work. Not all the time, only when I wasn’t in school and she had permission from her clients. That was when I learned not to be scared of Mom’s job.

  By the time Mom visits, people know they’re dying, that there won’t be a miracle or a way out.

  Mom’s job is to make people comfortable. She makes sure their pain meds work. She helps people figure out what unfinished business they have, and what to do about it. Sometimes she just sits with them and holds their hands.

  I tried to play those visits on the piano. I managed some of the mood, but there was a lot I didn’t get. I wrote down my half-pieces. My piano teacher said there was something there, but it wasn’t finished yet.

  My mom is really good at her work. Last year, though, she started coming home from work feeling burnt out. She’d lost too many people.

  Then she found a new boyfriend.

  She met him online. She came home tired every night, grabbed the laptop, sat on the couch, logged on, and bang, she was gone, off someplace where only she and Vernon Denys existed. I was alone except for keys clicking. I could play the piano as loud as I liked or watch anything I wanted on TV; she wasn’t even in the room.

  Sometimes while Mom typed she smiled. Sometimes she laughed, and sometimes she sighed. She hadn’t smiled much since Dad left two years ago, until she started typing to this guy.

  She got dreamy-eyed even when she wasn’t online. She started a lot of sentences with, “Vernon says,” or “Vernon thinks,” which could have been terminally irritating, except I liked what Vernon said and thought.

  Vernon sent presents: A miniature rosebush. Cedar and sage incense. One of those tabletop fountains, only this one looked like somebody had actually made it instead of it being mass-produced—it had polished rocks in it, red and green jasper, black obsidian, brown and white flint, rose quartz, and in the center, a piece of brown, gold-flecked pottery with a leafy face on it.

  Mom had never been good with houseplants, but Vernon told her how to take care of the rosebush, and it thrived. Its flowers started out red, then changed: orange, yellow, pink, white.

  One day I came home from school. I saw the rosebush, smelled a trace of last night’s cedar incense, heard the fountain murmuring in the living room. It occurred to me that our house looked, smelled, and sounded different now. A guy I didn’t even know had changed the way we lived. This spooked me.

  But I liked that sight and smell and sound.

  For a while, Vernon called on the phone. I talked to him a few times. He listened to me and wanted to know what I thought. I liked talking to him, but I was skeptical, too. He was a psychologist, and I figured he had to know how to make people think he was really listening to them; it was his job.

  Still, it was nice for Mom to have somebody listening to her.

  She and Vernon shared phone calls that lasted hours, but then they scaled back to typing at each other, for two reasons, I guess; one, to save Mom money on her phone bill, and two, because Mom captured the typed conversations and read them over and over.

  Five or six months after Mom and Vernon started typing to each other, Mom decided she and I were flying to California for spring break to meet him and his kids. “Fiona,” Mom said to me, “Vernon and I are getting married, if it’s okay with all of you. This trip is so we can find out about each other.”

  Vernon had two kids, Tam, a boy my age, fourteen, and Holly, an eight-year-old girl.

  “Have you even exchanged jpegs?” I asked Mom. We didn’t have a digital camera, but some of the kids I knew at school did. I’d suggested before that Mom have my friend Scott take a picture of her and upload it so she could send it to Vernon. Mom had laughed and vetoed that idea. “What do you really know about him?”

  “It doesn’t matter what he looks like. I know I love him. We’ve talked more since we met than your dad and I talked in twelve years of marriage.” She studied my face and smiled. “Okay. You think your mom is a fool. I don’t confirm or deny it. Let’s go check everything out, Fiona. If you can’t stand the Denyses, Vernon and I won’t take the next step now. I’ll stick with my long-distance relationship until you go away to college. It’s only four years.”

  “You’re that sure?”

  Mom grinned.

  I watched the weather channel to find out what to pack for a trip to California. We still had snow in Idaho, which mean the ninety-mile drive to the Spokane airport on Mom’s bald tires was going to be slow-going misery. But heck! Spring break in California! My friend Amy thought I was so lucky.

  As I packed summer shirts and the scary bikini I got last summer but never had the courage to wear, I thought about my dad.

  He and my stepmom and my baby half-sister lived ten minutes away from me and Mom. What if Mom married Vernon and we moved to California? It would make my two weekends a month of visitation a lot harder to manage. Maybe they’d just stop.

  I didn’t know if Dad cared about staying in touch with me. He usually brought work home on the weekends I spent at his house, so I ended up doing things with his second wife, Ginny. She was only ten years older than I was, and she had never figured out how to relate to me. Sometimes I was snotty and hideous to her. She responded by whining.

  She was supposed to be the grownup.

  Once she had the baby, she didn’t pay any attention to me at all, except to teach me how to take care of little Catrina and ask me if I wanted to babysit. Which, depending on how
broke I was and how much she was paying, I sometimes did. One thing my baby sister had going for her, she was really sweet.

  Okay. California. It had to be better than Idaho. For one thing, no snow in the winter. I also—based on my one trip to Disneyland right before my parents’ marriage broke up—knew California stores were better than the ones in our mall. Though the Denyses lived in the mountains somewhere between Santa Cruz and San Jose, not exactly in a town. Still.…

  On the plane I started worrying for real. Here we were, heading for California to meet strangers. I checked Mom out. She had lots of untamed frizzy black hair, and she sure wasn’t built like a model, although she had really gorgeous dark brown eyes. She was short, and fat, and freckled all over. She was wearing this red dress that was a little too tight over her stomach.

  I was so scared for her.

  I mean, she was in love with this guy, and he said he was in love with her, and they’d never met. Wasn’t this just like the setup for some horror movie where we ended up dead because we had too much faith in some unknown person’s word?

  Then, of course, there was me. Taller than Mom already, and thin in every way, even the bad ones; my best feature was my hair, which was thick and dark and wavy, not frizzy, and long enough to hide in. But Mom made me braid it on the plane so my face would show.

  When I woke up that morning I had no idea what to wear. I tried on three things, and then Mom said we had to leave for the airport right away. So I ended up in black jeans, a black long-sleeved shirt, and hiking boots. I looked like a walking stick. Way to make a first impression.

  This was, of course, a zit day.

  We landed at the San Jose airport, and there was no snow in sight. But there was this gorgeous fake-looking family waiting, with a sign that said MEG & FIONA, and the man held bouquets of iris and freesia and sprays of menthol-smelling leaves I later learned were eucalyptus, of which there’s a lot in California. Everybody in the Denys family was movie-star, magazine-model gorgeous. Vernon was muscular and clean-jawed, and he had all this curly brown hair, not like Dad, who was losing hair and adding stomach. Tam had crisp blond hair and slanted green eyes to die for, and Holly had long golden hair and eyes just like Tam’s. They had toothpaste smiles that made you wonder when the press would show up.

  It was creepy.

  My heart raced because I thought, oh no, Vernon will take one look at Mom, whom I love with most of my heart, and pretend he’s waiting for someone else.

  But that totally didn’t happen. He saw us and smiled, and the closer we got, the wider his smile.

  So I checked out the kids.

  They grinned like we were the ice cream truck driving up to their front door on a hot day.

  More horror movie warning signs.

  Then Mom hugged Vernon, and Vernon hugged her back, and then he handed me flowers and took my hand and said how happy he was to meet me and stared into my eyes like he was telling the total truth. And I believed him.

  I thought: Oh, no. This is actually going to happen.

  I thought: Well. Maybe it’ll work.

  Then we picked up the luggage and stepped out into the legendary California sunshine and smog, and I realized that, of course, a long-sleeved black shirt was not the thing to wear here.

  We climbed into a white minivan and drove to the Denyses’ house to look at our possible future.

  The drive up was scary. I mean, we were in a city when we started, and we drove past all kinds of interesting shopping opportunities, but then we were on a freeway, and we drove farther, and ran out of stores and gas stations and strip malls and into a piney forest, and then we got off the freeway and took narrower and narrower roads.

  I was from Idaho. I had already lived at the edge of the universe. What if there was nothing interesting within walking distance of the house? It was two whole years until I could drive.

  We drove off the road onto a long skinny driveway which took us higher into the mountains, deeper into the forest, and farther from everything else.

  Then the driveway ended, and there was the house, strange straight slabs of honey-colored wood, gleaming glass, trees pressing in around it, and a tumble of rocks and shrubs in front, redwood forest close all around.

  They had their own fountain. Or creek. Or waterfall, or pond. I guess one of each. As you approached the house, you looked to the right, and there was this rocky cliffy thing right next to the house, with water spilling down it, in some places trickling, and in some places waterfalls. At the bottom of the cliff was this pool, with all kinds of fuzzy-headed water plants and lily leaves growing in it. From the edge of the pool a little creek ran past the house, over really pretty stones, some of them as shiny as glass and some sandy. An arched bridge led from the driveway across the creek to the front door, and then the creek ran into another pond, this one round, with a fountain in the middle.

  If they were going to have waterworks, why couldn’t they be like normal Californians and have a swimming pool?

  I felt like we had dropped off the map of the known world.

  Vernon and Tam took our bags. I checked Mom’s expression. She looked excited. Okay. No help there.

  Then we went inside, and I thought, maybe we don’t need a town. This place is huge enough to have everything in it.

  Weird architecture. Wood everywhere, big giant windows so you couldn’t get out of the sun if you tried, strange skylights and roof angles and ceiling heights, and plants all over. Some of the plants were so big they didn’t leave much room for people.

  The entry hall was huge, and split-level, and jungly. There was this smell, water, leaves, flowers blooming, and dirt. Glassed hallways led away in two directions. In front of us across the entry hall, two steps down took you into a big living room. Pale carpet, stone-topped tables, lots of space and light and distance. And, of course, plants.

  “Shoes off, please,” said Vernon, setting the suitcases down and slipping out of his loafers. His kids had already taken off their shoes and stored them in this little shelfy thing to the side of the sunken entryway, pulled out pairs of slippers and slipped them on.

  My face heated. Boy, if we had to do this every time we came into the house, it was going to get old fast. I stooped and untied my hiking boots, kicked them off. Holly gave me a pair of pink scuff slippers. I wondered if anybody else’s smelly feet had been inside them, but they looked new. I put them on. Mom stowed her shoes neatly in the compartment thingie and glared at me until I put my boots away too. They were too big for the shelves, so I put them on top.

  Then Vernon led us on a tour.

  He had a whole wing of the house where people came so he could counsel them. Like, a waiting room with magazines, and an office where they had sessions, and a spare bathroom we weren’t supposed to use. There was all this artwork, too, pictures that grabbed your attention and took you to other worlds. This wing had its own outside entrance. Vernon showed me the door between this part of the house and the rest. “When this door is shut, it means I’m working, and nobody should come through here unless there’s an emergency involving fire or blood,” he said, but he smiled while he said it.

  Then we checked out a wing of the house with bedrooms, one of which was apparently mine, since Tam put my suitcase in it. I had this feeling that Mom had told Vernon way too much about me. The room was decorated in blue and pale tan and some gold, and there were a couple of small statues from India on the furniture, gods with six or eight arms and interesting dance poses. On the dresser sat a gilded Buddha.

  My favorite color was blue. I’d been studying Eastern Religions.

  “Like it?” Holly asked.

  “Yeah.” In a way I wanted to hate it. Everything was happening too fast.

  “My room’s across the hall.” Holly pointed to a carved wooden door. “Tam’s is around the corner, and the bathroom’s over here.”

  We all went to check out the bathroom. It was awesome—big and carpeted, with a shower and a bathtub, and I had my own towel rack,
with a set of blue towels—a bath towel, a hand towel, and a washrag. How classy could you get? Tam’s towels were gray and Holly’s were red.

  My stomach lurched a little.

  We headed farther into the house, and there was the master bedroom. Vernon put Mom’s suitcase there. Which I thought was extremely weird, since this was the first day they had met each other face to face. Shouldn’t Mom be in a guest room?

  I tried not to look, but I couldn’t help noticing that the bed was huge. A family of five could sleep on it and never bump into each other. My face overheated again, and I was glad when we moved on.

  We passed a library, an office complete with a computer desk, which I guessed was where Vernon had sat while he was Instant Messaging to Mom, a couple more guest rooms, another bathroom. How big was this place? Big enough to get lost in! I didn’t know anybody in Idaho who had a house this big.

  We went back to the living room. Where was the entertainment center? Did they have a PlayStation? Was there even a TV? Did these people have cable? Premium channels? Any channels at all?

  Vernon said, “Here’s the new piano we got for you, Fiona.”

  And there it was, around a corner, in an alcove of its own: a Story & Clark upright, varnished the color of weak tea.

  Mom had already told me that if she and Vernon decided to live together, I couldn’t move my old piano, which was as ugly as dirt and weighed about eight hundred pounds. It was a weird square piano that was hard to keep in tune. It had come with our Idaho house when Mom and Dad moved in, before I was born. Nobody could get the piano out; they figured people had built the house around it. Nobody played it, either, until Mom and Dad thought it would be cute to get me piano lessons when I was about six.

  I used to hate to practice, but something happened a couple of years into my relationship with the piano. The piano started talking to me. I got this sense of power from it. It told me we could do things together. Then I got so I could hear a song on the radio and play it. That was a rush; music couldn’t get away from me. Once I heard it, I owned it.