The Orange Houses (6 page)

Mik caught a third, bright red. Not bugs but paper, folded.

“Lord,” Mom said. “It's snowing colors.”

Tiny angels pirouetted from the sky. Ballerinas, ball-players, birds. On a hawk's wings was written PEACE. Mik looked for Fatima. She found Jimmi standing on a mailbox. He was releasing hundreds of paper dolls into the breeze.

Shoppers young and old scrambled for the dolls. Everyone was laughing.

Mik grinned.

Jimmi slid down the mailbox and headed for Mik with a rainbow painted angel.

Mom cut him off. “Will you please leave the child alone, James? Please now, before I call the police.”

Jimmi bowed his head, tucked the angel into the lapel of Mom's overcoat, stepped onto his skateboard and drifted downhill. His jeans hung loose on him, his shirt baggy, his face gaunt.

Mik marched past Mom with DO YOU HAVE TO HATE HIM SO MUCH, MA?

“Slow down with those hands. I can't understand—”

“I know you can't.” She clicked off her aids and slumped toward Joe Knows's joint.

“ . . . account number already set up in your name, Sandrine, in trust for Mik. All y'all have to do is type in the . . . ” Joe fell asleep.

Mik stopped petting the German shepherd to tap Joe's fingers, yellowed and bent from sixty years of smoking.

Joe picked up where he left off: “ . . . password, go to online bill paying, cut a check to the doc, hospital, whatever. I think there's enough cash to cover everything.”

Mom hugged him.

“Hey now.” Joe patted Mom's back. “This is no big deal, okay? It's just life. And you, my friend.” He winked at Mik.

Mik winked back.

“You're thinking, maybe I don't want to get the operation.” He tapped his temple. “Joe knows. Look, take your time. The money's yours for whatever. I know you'll do something beautiful with it.”

 

That night Mik hit Mom's closet and dug out the old guitar. She opened the window to let in the wind. Straddling the sill, she turned her aids on and all the way up. She plucked the low string, her cheek on the guitar's belly. The vibrations reached deep into her head. She plucked harder, the bass note pulsing in her stomach . . .

Plucked harder, fuzzy fingers walking her spine . . .

Pluck—

The string snapped, the cut-off sound cold and sharp in Mik's ears.

A poke at her shoulder.

Mom was home two hours early, a dark brown starburst on her chest as if she'd been shot.

“What the—”

“Coolatta machine exploded. Running a stupid summer shake these fall days.” She grabbed the guitar. “How'd you like if I poked through your closet?” She dug a string out of the case, threaded the fresh E through the bridge.

“Play for me,” Mik said. “I'll rest my hands on the belly.”

“I'm sure I forget how.” Mom frowned, picked at a chip in the worn fret board. “You gonna get the operation?”

Mik looked down into the courtyard. Drunk dudes swore at each other to wake the world. She wanted to click off her aids but didn't dare while Mom was in this state, ready to cry or scream or both. “Ma, if you never gonna play that guitar again, why you restringing it?”

Drine Sykes shoved the guitar into her closet and grabbed a fresh shirt. “I gotta get back to work.”

Word was getting out about Fatima's teaching. Yesterday she had two students. Today the ten chairs around the rec room table were full. Most of the students were young children taking time off from visiting their parents upstairs. One of the latecomers was a burn patient covered in bandages. A girl gasped when the man came to the table in his motorized wheelchair.

“Sorry,” the man said. He turned for the door.

Fatima brought him back to the table and sat him next to the shocked girl. Seeing Fatima at ease with the man calmed the girl. “Now,” Fatima said, “today we are going to make a school of newsprint dolphins.”

 

She rushed from the hospital to pick up Mik from school. Mik was out front, her eyes darting about the street for the bully girl.

“I thought she has been suspended,” Fatima said.

“Doesn't mean she isn't waiting for us,” Mik said. “You're lucky you don't have to go to school.”

“I am finding many wonderful books in the garbage on the other side of the reservoir, outside the college.”

 

At the supermarket Fatima said, “This is ridiculous, all of the things we can buy here.”

“This store is booty. You should see the rich folks' markets downtown.”

“Five kinds of apples?”

“Apples are lame.”

“We can only dream of apples where I come from. What is this, this star fruit? This is food to make our imaginations strong.” Fatima gathered up an armload.

 

They sat on milk crates in Fatima's yard, eating what they cooked on a grill they found on the street. The arthritic cat crawled out from the woods into Fatima's lap. She fed him bits of fish. “I call him Every Third because he comes only every third day. He is a stray, but he lingers longer with each visit. With winter near he is realizing he needs a friend.” She said to the cat, “Do not fear, little one. My door is always open to you. How would I say this in sign?”

“Why you want to know?”

“For when I return to my country. To teach the children. Show me.”

Mik showed her. Fatima was a quick study.

Mik indicated the cinderblock fence. “Weren't these walls pink?” She signed as she spoke.

“I changed the color yesterday to amuse myself. Next week they will be turquoise.” The twilight sun on the freshly painted orange walls warmed Fatima. She took in the backyard: swept clean cement, plastic vines hanging from a sawed-down willow trunk, a bowl chopped into the top for a birdbath. “By springtime we will have an oasis back here for my sister's arrival.” She hoped Mik would not ask if any word had arrived from the camps.

She didn't. She said, “We should paint the walls a rainbow.”

“I know where we can get the paint. Come. In that lot back there, through all that creeping thorn, is a treasure palace.”

 

Dead vines covered the house. Its windows had been smashed long ago. Gauzy bits of curtain twisted in the breeze. In the shed were enough paint buckets to cover the house. “Lots of light green here,” Mik said. “Cool color.”

“This is the Statue of Liberty's color, no?”

“Never been. Hey, the dolls, why not pipe cleaners or wood or clay? Why always newspaper?”

“It was all we had.” They pushed through the weeds choking the lot, into the abandoned house.

“You scared?” Mik said.

“It would be no fun otherwise, Sister Mik.”

Graffiti covered the walls and ceilings. The staircase was carved with initials and years that went back to the 1970s. In the kitchen Fatima found a cracked clock radio and a dusty cat box. In the home office were looted medical cabinets and books that illustrated procedures for surgeries, polyp removal, abortion. Mik eyed the surgery chair. “Let's get out of here.”

 

A weed tree grew through the roof. This high uphill one could see across the valley, west to the Riverdale cliffs. Below, the Orange Houses were an ocean of lights. Up here the streetlights didn't work. Fatima and Mik pointed out shooting stars to each other.

“Should I get the operation?” Mik said.

Fatima eyed the moon. “Only you can say. Operation or not, you must get your mother to teach you to play guitar.”

“How did your mother die?”

“We were out collecting fire sticks on a night like this, Mom, my sister and I. We saw torch lights, how do you say it here, flashlights. The men were coming. I was small, my sister smaller, we would not have made it back to camp. My mother told us to run. We did but turned back when we saw Mom was not running with us. Mom said, ‘This is nothing, what will happen next. This is nothing. Go. Go and be strong. Be happy always.' She pushed us on and remained behind and ran in the opposite direction so the men would chase her and lose track of us. That was the last we saw of her.” Fatima clapped her hand on Mik's shoulder. “Jimmi taught you his If game, yes?” She closed her eyes, said, “If a bright future. Do you see it?”

“Tell me.”

“You, my sister, and I are in Liberty's torch.” She opened her eyes. “Look at these stars. I cannot believe that I am here, that you are here. This is all we need.” Fatima pointed to the highest point in the sky. “Do you see her? My mother. She is happy. Do you see her winking at us?” Fatima signed to the sky, HELLO, GOOD-BYE, I LOVE YOU.

Mik couldn't sleep. She went into Mom's room and lay next to her. Mom woke, rubbed her eyes, yawned in the gray green streetlight flickering through the curtain. “What's wrong?”

Mik stared into her mother's eyes, held her hand.

“Mika?”

“Shhhhh. Let's just stay like this.”

Jimmi heated the tip of a ballpoint with his lighter. He stripped off his socks and burned small blue 6s into the secret places, the bottom of his feet, between his toes. He whispered, “My name the Mad Sixes, beast of no fixes, running on wishes, call me clown vicious. Been a while now, up the dial now, watch me, watch me, watch me rile now. Owners and architects spinning their winnings, building mad wormwood for the meek to trip in, and the devils laugh, ‘Drown, drown, drown.'”

He wrote on his arm:

Mom bunched Mik's braids as Mik brushed her teeth. “Are you humming?” Mom said. “Careful, girlfriend. You keep up like this, folks might think you're happy.”

 

Mik only went to church because if she didn't NaNa called demons out from the O House walls and prayed over her.

Dressed in their best jeans and coats, their Target shoes shined, mother, daughter and sometime Granny marched uphill toward a storefront church. Mik helped NaNa. The old woman hung full weight off Mik's arm. “Lawd, hill's steeper than the trail to Golgotha. Lawd, send an earthquake to level this devil hill.”

When they came to Joe Knows's joint they found Jimmi sitting on the sidewalk, head in hands. The bodega was closed, chain gate down, lights out, windows smashed. CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS tape X-ed the door.

NaNa touched Jimmi's shoulder. “James?”

Jimmi's face was swollen. He gently squeezed NaNa's hand, stepped onto his skateboard and gunned downhill without paying mind to the traffic.

“Joe get robbed?” Mom asked the owner of the ninety-nine cents store next door.

The man was opening his chain gate for a day that would be hectic with the after-church crowd. “Joe got dead.”

“No,” NaNa said.

“Fell asleep in his office with a lit cigarette in his mouth last night, the fire department figured. Burned the back of the building three stories up. Was a roomful of illegals on the third floor. Gate to the fire escape was rusted shut. Five Chinese living in a single room, you believe it? Hell we gonna do for takeout delivery now?” The old man spit. “Only good thing about it is we don't gotta deal with that stinking old German shepherd no more.”