Guillermo finally drags his eyes away to inspect the boys. “You live here, you work. You do what I say, no complaints.”
“Same as my house.” India rests a hand on his arm, and Guillermo’s posture softens at her touch. I should take notes—her way is much more effective than mine, which basically shouts
fuck you
.
“Let’s talk in the yard,” Guillermo says.
We follow him through the house while he lists his expectations, which are mainly not to be a jerk or a thief. Once out back, a crowd gathers around Guillermo and India. I pick out Carlos and Micah, along with other faces that have become familiar, but there are new ones in the mix. The trees in the yard have filled out, and they’ve one-upped us by building a greenhouse out of salvaged windows. Our plant starts now live in a greenhouse made of clear plastic.
“Looks like it may work out,” Eric says from behind me and Grace.
“I hope so,” I say.
I look at the sky. Dust-streaked clouds float in brown-tinged blue above the buildings. The wind has stirred up our ruined city again, and New York hangs above us in a billion particles of destruction. It’s warm and getting warmer every day. The cold seems far away, and I wonder where I’ll be this winter. Grace hasn’t yet mentioned a return trip to Brooklyn Heights. All she has to do is say the word. I feel guilty for not bringing it up, but I’m scared—of the zombies and of leaving here. We might never get back.
“It’s going to be cold this winter,” I say.
“If they freeze, we can live anywhere,” Grace says. “I don’t see how they won’t freeze. They’re still bodies.”
“Dead bodies that walk around, so who knows? But
we’re
going to freeze.”
“Oh ye of little faith,” Eric says. “Don’t you think I have a plan for that?”
“Won’t you be upstate?”
“We’ll all be upstate.” He raises his eyebrows. “Right?”
I look to Grace, who for once manages to wear an unreadable expression. I can’t answer that question unless she does. “When are you going?” I ask the ground.
“After we plant the gardens, I’ll see if I can get out of the city. Then I’ll be back to get everyone.”
“So we’ll talk about it then.”
He frowns and points to the generator Gary uses. “If all else fails, we can find a generator and use electric heaters. All those abandoned cars have a lot of gas. We should use it up before it goes bad.”
“Gas goes bad?” Grace asks.
“Eventually.” He describes something having to do with oxidation, while Guillermo’s speech ends and the crowd breaks up. India and the boys talk with those who linger.
We make our way over. “So, it’s a go?” I ask India.
“It’s a go,” she says. “Now I just have to keep my kids from fucking it up.”
“Good luck with all that.”
She laughs and raises a finger to where Guillermo waves her over. “Thanks for the vote of confidence. Okay, looks like I’ve got to go charm someone.” She takes a couple steps and turns back. “Hey, call me Indy.”
I watch her stroll away and decide I should work on walking like her, too. Eric pulls his hand from behind his back and holds out three dandelions. “A nosegay. For you.”
I make no move to take them. “You’ve sunk to a new low.”
“Sylvie!” Grace admonishes.
“Nosegay is our word,” I say to her, and then turn to him. “Do three dandelions even count as a nosegay?”
“The definition is
a small bunch of flowers
.” He takes my hand, pries it open, and folds my fingers around the stems. “And that, my sweet, is a small bunch of flowers.”
“Fucker,” I mutter.
“She doesn’t like to lose,” Eric says to Grace.
“Tell me about it.”
I
hate
to lose, and I’ve had a lead thus far, but he’s closing the gap. Maria walks over. “We should get back and work in the yard. Nice flowers. You have a secret admirer?”
“No, I have an opponent who’ll stop at nothing to win.”
Eric’s laugh fills the yard. He rests an arm on my shoulders as we walk to say goodbye. “I would’ve given them to you anyway, as your not-so-secret admirer.”
“Are not,” I say because I’ve regressed to the word skills of a kindergartener. I keep my eyes on my yellow flowers and wonder if he means it. Because even if my nerves jangle and I can barely fight the fear that rises at the thought of acting on the feelings I keep tamped down, I really, really want him to mean it.
He leans in. “I admire you very much, Scotch-Brite.”
I kick him.
Chapter 71
Less than a week later, we’ve potted every last seed and some of the first have sprung two tiny leaves. The gardens where seeds were sown directly into dirt look greenish at certain angles. I have absolutely no idea what anything is or how much food it will create or any interest in eating three-quarters of it, but it still makes me happy to see—there’s something satisfying about creating something new out of almost nothing.
Grace finishes watering a patch and hooks the hose to the side of the barrel. Eric bolted a barrel to a rolling cart and attached a hose with a shower head to the spigot on the bottom. We roll it around the yard to water, which is both ingenious and much easier than dumping buckets of water without destroying the delicate plants.
“What’s that going to be?” I ask Grace.
“Spinach.”
“Ah, my old nemesis.” She doesn’t reply. “I’ll bet you’re excited for spinach. You can sprinkle it with those dried cherries and walnuts and have your big old salad.”
She raises a shoulder. We’ve found more food: someone had a stash hidden in their basement, probably acquired sometime after the madness began. They had water, too, so why they left is known only to them. Possibly to find people—we have both food and water but Grace is as unhappy as ever, maybe unhappier, because of her missing people.
Guillermo was near Downtown Brooklyn the other day. Although Grace didn’t ask him to check, he did and was sorry to report that Brooklyn Heights still looks bad. We did, however, ask him to bring food to Brother David, and Brother David sent back his regards along with the Precious Moments picture, out of its frame and rolled in a tube. Leo admired it so much we let him put it in his room. The look on Paul’s face when he realized he would never talk Leo out of
hanging up the cute puppy
was worth getting thrown from my bike a million times over.
Brother David held a special mass and gave Guillermo their improvised Communion wafers to bring home to his mother and sister. Not sure that was kosher, but I have a feeling Pope Zombie the First won’t mind. Upon Guillermo’s insistence, Brother David said they’d relocate to Sunset Park if we can figure out a way to move the church’s residents.
“Hey, want to meditate?” I ask Grace.
Her eyes narrow into the look of subtle irritation she wears much of the time. “No. And neither do you. Stop, okay?”
I turn my face to the sun instead of answering. When I open my eyes, Grace is gone and Eric watches me, head cocked. “You’re not Grace,” I say.
“Good to know you can still tell us apart. What are you doing?”
“Enjoying May.”
He tilts his face to the sky. “It’s pretty enjoyable,” he says, eyes closed. He opens them again. “Or did you want to enjoy it alone?”
“No, you’re good.” He’s so good that enjoying May with him is even better than doing it alone—and I don’t feel that way often.
“I wish we could enjoy May somewhere else. Go someplace.”
“You could, but I wouldn’t recommend it,” I say. If he spends all his spare time hiking and climbing things and gauging his distance in miles, our closed space must resemble a cage. “Where would you go? If you could go anywhere?”
“Anywhere in the world?” he asks, and I nod. “Besides the cabin, I’d go to Prospect Park.”
“I’ve just given you free rein to go anywhere in the world and you choose the park two miles away?”
“It’s one of my favorite places. Especially this one part.”
“Which part?”
“It used to be a formal garden with a fountain, but the plants have taken over. It’s like an abandoned ruin in the middle of the city. The water is full of algae and the trees hang over the pools and walkways. It’s so…lush.”
Grace and I used to roam Prospect Park when the weather was too lovely to attend high school, and one day we happened upon a place that sounds similar. “I think Grace and I were there once.”
“Really?”
I close my eyes, drawing out the memory from wherever it’s been hiding. And with it comes the remembrance of being a teenager. The freedom of charting my own direction, even if it was just for the day. The belief that I could do whatever I wanted with my life. I would never work a job I hated just to pay my bills. I’d have a husband who stuck around and, possibly, kids I cared for. I wouldn’t hold back. I’d never be my mother.
I miss that girl.
“You walk down steps to the round fountain,” I say. “It’s surrounded by those zigzag red bricks instead of concrete. There are benches to sit and watch the pool. Except there wasn’t any water when we were there.”
“It’s dry if it hasn’t rained,” he says softly.
I nod with my eyes closed, picturing the sun-dappled walkway. The fountain filled with greenery that had spilled over from what were once carefully-planned beds. The trees that moved in the wind and silenced the noises of the city. “No one came by the whole time we were there. It felt enchanted. We tried to find it again but we never could. I asked a few people, but no one knew what I was talking about. I thought maybe we’d suffered a mass, two-person hallucination.”
I open my eyes to find him lit up by more than the sun, as if we’ve stumbled upon the magical place together, and I have the absurdly fanciful longing for it to have happened that way. If I’d found it again and he’d been there, I might’ve met Eric years ago—that girl might’ve met Eric.
“I can’t believe you know it,” he says. “It’s called the Vale of Cashmere. From a poem, but I don’t remember which one.”
“That’s a pretty name. Vale means valley.”
“I know that, thank you very much,” he says haughtily, and then pokes me in the shoulder. “But I had to look it up.”
I laugh. “I wish I could see it again.”
“I’ll take you when the zombies die.”
“So, never?”
Eric’s next words are drowned out by Paul, who sticks his head out a back door and yells, “Bro, I need you.”
Eric doesn’t respond. Paul comes puffing into the yard. When he nears, Eric says, “We were just discussing the Vale of Cashmere. Sylvie knows it.”
“That old fountain?”
“Yeah. We’re going when the zombies die.”
Paul’s eye twitches. “That’s great. I need your help.”
“All right.” Eric leaves with him, walking backward for a few steps. “It’s a date.”
I’m flustered enough that Paul’s scowl doesn’t inspire outright hate, though I do turn to the garden and make a face more suited to a six-year-old than an admittedly immature twenty-seven-year-old. From what I can tell, the spinach doesn’t appear offended, but it doesn’t deserve that.
“I’m sorry,” I say to the plants. “I don’t want to eat you, but I’m not mad at you.”
“Who are you talking to?” comes from behind. Thankfully, it’s Leo’s voice.
“The spinach.”
“You’re cuckoo in the brain,” he says, and for a five-year-old he sure does have his sanctimonious face down pat.
I bend to tickle his sides. “If you can have imaginary weapons, I can talk to spinach, right? Right?”
“Okay, okay!” he gasps out, and then goes still. “Sylvie!”
I follow his gaze to the bowl of cat food by the back fence, which we refill with a bag of kibble I found in a house. Every morning it’s gone, and up to now I thought it might be squirrels, but that black and white cat is crouched with his head in the bowl.
The cat looks up as we edge closer. Leo is picking up speed, so I say, “Don’t make any sudd—”
Leo’s off and running. The cat streaks under the fence. Leo stops, shoulders drooping, and by the time I catch up, his eyes are wet and his lips are set in his harbinger-of-tears pout.
“Don’t cry,” I say. “You scared him, that’s all. I’m sure he’ll be back.”
He shakes his head, ripe for a breakdown. I give him a mock incredulous face and put my hands on my hips. “Seriously, squirt, what’d you expect? He’s eating lunch and all of a sudden this giant monster the size of eight cats comes running toward him like a bat out of hell.”
Leo keeps his sad face in place, milking this for all its worth. I continue, “What if you were sitting in the yard, eating cupcakes happy as can be, when a giant came bounding toward you? Would you say,
Hey, a giant who might kill me, that’s cool
, or would you run for your life?”
He finally cracks and, with a laugh, jumps and screams, “I’d say
Aaaaaah, a giant! Run for your life!
”
What I like best about Leo is that he’d rather be cheerful than sulking, and the most effective way to change his course is to call him on his drama. However, his volume control could use some work. I hover a finger over his lips. “There’s not really a giant. You didn’t have to give me the full dramatization.”
Paul comes out the back door and moves toward us. He probably heard the scream. Leo giggles, then climbs a chair and holds out his arms. “Pick me up, Syls.”
“Aren’t you too old for that?” I ask.
He flings himself so I have no choice. At least with Leo I don’t have to coo and make noises. Whenever I’m handed a baby, I suspend all movement until they take it back again. He hangs by my shoulders to look into my face. “Do you think he’ll come back?”
“I do. Everyone needs food and, if you have some, they’ll want to stick around. Same thing for cats.”
Paul removes Leo from my arms. “True. You’re still here. It must be the food. Or is it that you have nowhere else to go?”
There are things I could say—I’ve added to our food, I only take my share—but I’m shocked into a silence where none of that matters. I’m still the girl who relies on others. Free school breakfast and lunch, free clothes, free school supplies where the pencils lose their lead and the notebooks are so flimsy they tear when you erase, a free home with my best friend’s parents. The kid with nothing and nowhere to go. I’d thought I left her behind, but she’s caught up with me.