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