Page 31

June 30, 1997

LUCE WENT HOME.Up the wooden steps, across the deck. Moose at the door, wagging his tail. Good boy. She moved slowly, knew what she was heading toward.

Down the hall, passing through the doorway but this time wanting all the smells of this life, urine and sweat and plastics and old tree branches decomposing. She pulled back the blanket, squeezed into bed with Gem. Arms wrapped around Gem’s body. She pressed her nose to Gem’s neck. Breathed in, held her breath. And when she exhaled, there, finally, she wept.

Gem’s chest, beneath her arms, did not rise or fall. Her eyes were closed. The steady beat of her heart, which had thrummed on and on all these years with its magnificent, mysterious perseverance, was stilled.

A faint warmth remained in Gem’s body. Luce held on and held on. Thought about when Gem taught her to build fairy traps out of old abalone shells and sticks when they camped by the beach. Gem’s stinky breath in the morning, when Luce crawled into bed beside her and pressed their eyelashes together in a butterfly kiss. She held her and cried until she felt emptied out. It was a long time.

Roo came in and stood in the doorway, watching them, and then he understood. Juan peeked around the corner then, too, saw what was happening and started coming over, but Luce shook her head no, and he left them alone. Roo climbed in on the other side and put his arm around Gem and did not cry. Lay there, eyes staring at the ceiling, unblinking.

It was too much, she knew. It was too much for anyone, for kids, for Roo, but here they were. Luce reached her arm across the bed, around him, too. “Mom’s not coming back either,” he said.

“Roo—” Luce started, trying to find something to say to soften it, contradict it, because how did he know this? His hair was tangled again, and she ran her fingers through it. “She would if she could,” Luce said.

“I know that,” Roo said. “We’re her favorite things.”

Luce had wondered how long her aunt could survive without her mother as some kind of tether to the world of the living. She’d guessed it wouldn’t be long, and she was right. Just long enough to guide them to what they needed to know.

Later, after they’d unwound themselves from Gem, Juan helped them fold her body in a clean cotton sheet. Light candles. They gathered flowers from the yard, roses and lavender and buttercup, a few sprigs of rosemary, and placed them along Gem’s body. It didn’t take much conversation for them to agree where she would go.

“Do you remember when we went to the beach, where there was an oil spill a long time ago, and the big lake that connected to the ocean?” Roo asked. Luce said yes, the estuary, where there had once been big hair logs to soak up the spill, and how did he remember that, he’d been a baby. Roo didn’t answer her, just went on. It was afternoon, chilly and gray, and they’d shared a jar of dill pickles. “Mama and Gem and you and me.” And they’d all buried each other in the sand and given each other sand mermaid tails and seaweed hair, did she remember? She did remember. Roo said, “It was all a great day, but that was my favorite part.” What part, Luce wanted to know. “When we were all the same species.”

By the next morning, Una was gone.

So were a big handful of other Red Grovers, eight or ten. It was more people than Una had said were involved, though Luce wasn’t sure whether that was because Una had lied or had convinced a bigger group to leave so that Luce would never be positive exactly who knew. Maybe, even, there were people who did not think it was worthwhile to live in the Red Grove without Una.

There was still a lot that Roo didn’t know. She wasn’t sure if she’d ever tell him all of it. It seemed like there were some things better left in the dark. But he did know that their mother and Gem had both died, and that, in a few days, they would need to leave the Red Grove. He knew that a lot of other people were leaving, too, like Boog, first to a hospital to recover and then somewhere farther away, which he was happy about, the way she’d scared him on their adventure, but he didn’t know why, not really, not the whole thing. It was a lot for a little kid to take in, and Luce watched him carefully. Told him that soon, as soon as things were a little calmer, they could get another pet. A cat or hamster or fish maybe? Anything he wanted. He nodded, rubbing Moose’s belly, asking if Moose thought it was a good plan. Moose narrowed his eyes, rubbed his nose into the ground. Roo reported that Moose said yes, it was a very, very good plan.

The next morning, Juan helped them dig a hole right next to where the new redwood saplings had been planted, beside where their mother was buried. She told Juan. Had to. She would not spread it out through the Red Grove to ruin it for everyone, but she could not hold it alone.

Though she knew there were lots of people who would have liked to mourn Gem, Luce did not yet know who to trust, who she could talk to about the last few days. And so it was just Luce, Roo, Gramms, and Juan as they set Gem’s shrouded body into the hole. They lowered her body into the ground, covered it in flowers and herbs, and sprinkled dirt onto the cloth, and right away the tiny threaded filaments began growing over her, into her. Receiving her. It wouldn’t be long before nature began the work of returning Gem to earth, as her sister was returning beside her.

“Hi, Gem,” Roo said, looking up into the trees. “Hi, Mama.”

They filled the hole. Chose the new trees to go on top. Gramms asked if anyone wanted to say anything, and Luce did, she wanted to say everything. She needed to, but the muscles in her throat were too tired. She grabbed Roo’s hand instead. They looked together at the dirt, at the very small redwood saplings planted over their mother, over their aunt. The trees would grow and grow for a hundred, maybe a thousand years. They would be indestructible.

Juan proposed that they sing “Amazing Grace,” but nobody knew the words.

“Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf,” Roo started humming and then singing, and Gramms chuckled, and Juan looked at them—weird?—but Luce joined him and then they all did.

Was it different now? Luce had been grieving Gem for eight years, since she’d been lost to her everdream. And in some ways she’d been grieving her mother her whole life. So was this different, now that they were dead? She kept wondering, telling herself that it wasn’t, even though she felt a new kind of pinching, piercing inside. She thought of the story her mother had told her about the performer Mirin Dajo. Believing himself invulnerable, he pierced holes all the way through his body, sliding swords into the back and out the front. Some moments, when Luce felt the searing and pinching and piercing inside, she wanted to scream, Help me! Help! I am having a heart attack! But she didn’t. She knew better. It was just her holes, pierced all the way through.

Gramms and Juan both said they wanted to stay with Luce and Roo, but she said no. Not yet. She needed some time to think, pacing the kitchen, cleaning, trying to figure out what came next. She was sure that Gramms and Juan were being nice for the moment, felt obligated to stick around, that before long they would leave.

Luce stared out at the trees, trying to figure out what to have them do. A figure appeared in the doorframe, thin-boned and snuffling, a slow-moving Roo wrapped in a blanket. He shuffled toward her. He’d been crying. Of course he had. His mother was dead. Hers too, but fucking hell, if she could feel triple the pain so that he would have none, she would. Wrapped up like this, his small, puffy face looked so gentle, so eager. He put one sweaty hand on Luce’s knee. “How are you doing?” he asked. Heart the size of the ocean, her Roo.

She scooped him up onto her hip and carried him back into his bedroom, the floor scattered with toys and costumes. She set him down, and he spread the blanket out, lay belly-down on top of it, his face smooshed into the rug. She sat down beside him. He was wearing basketball shorts, no shirt, his hair scattershot in all directions. Moose trotted in and lay against Roo’s other side. This was Gloria’s act. In those rare quiet moments when she’d appear in the doorway as one or the other was getting ready for bed, or when they’d had fevers, in the two weeks they’d been laid out with whooping cough, there she’d be. Her weight on the side of the bed, tilting their small bodies toward her, scratching their backs.

Luce used her fingertips. Gently they brushed across the skin of his back, the fingers trailing with such lightness that it left a trail of goose bumps in its wake. Roo shivered, and she scratched a little harder, watching his breathing even out under her fingers, watching his scrunched frown soften into dream. And then, as Luce lay down beside him, he opened his eyes and nodded at her. “She’s okay now,” he said. “It’s very peaceful in there.”