twenty-eight

“Excuse me Mama. Mama? Do you know that if that cheetah wanted to, it could eat you in five seconds and jump over the fence and grab you and you cannot stop it because it’s the fastest animal in the world, faster than your car and an airplane and even faster than a whale and the whole ocean when there are big, enormous waves?”

“Wow, really?” Her voice is engaged, but she’s looking at a map of the zoo.

“Yes. Really. AND it can jump with all the legs at the same time like this, but it has four legs, and also it has spots. But it doesn’t climb trees like the leopard so don’t worry. It won’t fall on your head.”

“Good,” the mama says.

“Yeah. Good. But if you look at the tiger in her eyes, she’ll get scared, because she doesn’t want to see your eyes, because she’s walking near the water, and she’s hungry.”

“You want to go see the tiger?” Mama asks.

“Okay. But don’t look at her,” he answers.

“I won’t.”

“I will look at her, but not in her eyes.”

“Sounds good,” Mama says.

“Yeah,” he answers.

“Let’s go.”

The mother and child disappear into the mini-savannah that connects the cheetahs to the zebras, where you can walk through the tall grass and imagine what it’s like to be hunting antelope. The only cheetah I spot is asleep, under a rock dome, oblivious to the striped prey prancing on the other side of a metal fence. Presumably, back in Africa, they would have made an excellent dinner. Here, the cheetahs get fed twice a day, and all they have to do is walk to the gray house when the keepers come around. I wouldn’t tell the kid that.

Eva walks up the path wearing a new sweater. It’s blue. She also has a new pair of jeans on and her hair is down. Her hands are in her pocket.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hey.”

“I told you I’d clean up,” she says.

“I have your key.”

She doesn’t say anything for a while, then her face softens into something like hope.

“Did you go in?” she says softly.

“No.”

She takes one hand out of her pocket and puts it on my shoulder. My body tightens and she pulls her hand away.

“Do you want to sit somewhere?” she says.

Something is different today. She’s not even mad I didn’t go in.

“Actually, I would rather walk.”

“Okay. Where do you want to go?” she asks.

“I don’t know. You probably know this place better than I do.”

“Probably. We used to come here a lot.”

I think she means with her mother, but I know better than to ask. Not right now. We pass the pandas and head down the hill, but they’ve closed off the house where the hippo and the elephants used to live.

“I don’t know where they’ve put the hippo,” Eva says. “Pablo loved him. We’d wait for him to come up and snort and laugh our asses off. My mom was the best at making animal noises. She did the best elephant.”

I nod and swerve around a bulldozer, past the small mammals to the back of the ape house. The gorillas aren’t out today. It’s too cold for them.

“Can we go in here?” I ask, already pushing the back door.

Eva nods.

“Sure,” she says. “I love the gorillas.”

We’re doing the exhibit backwards, but there’s no one here to get on our case. The orangutans are looking especially shaggy, picking fleas out of each other’s hair, neck, and elbows. One of them has a gaping wound on his neck that makes me look away. It reminds me of the hole in the Irish singer’s guitar. Each time the orangutan swings from one branch to the other, the scar opens up a little, but nothing falls out, and nothing seems to be back there. It’s just an open, flappy wound. I wish someone would tell me what happened to him.

“That’s Mandara,” Eva says, pointing to the gorillas in their indoor playgrounds. “Over there. She’s the super-mom.”

A long, black, hairy arm hangs loose from the side of a hammock, and the fingers scrape the floor from time to time. I follow the arm to a shoulder, then a long face with sad, peaceful eyes. As we approach the glass, Mandara turns around and gives us her back. A tiny gorilla climbs over her waist to the other side. I had missed the baby before.

“That’s Kibibi,” Eva says. “It means little girl. She was born last year, to one of the silverback boys chewing over there.”

I count four other gorillas. Most of them are eating. They sit down on their heels and then shuffle around and sit again.

“How do you know all this stuff?”

Eva shrugs. “I like animals.”

I nod.

“They’re comforting, you know. They don’t break your balls. They don’t need much. They just do their thing, no questions, no bullshit.”

“I guess,” I say.

When the silverback moves, the others get out of his way. He looks bored to me, unchallenged in his cage.

“It doesn’t make you a little sad?” I ask.

“What?” Eva says, her eyes fixed on the scene behind the glass.

“I don’t know. That they’re captive and stuff,” I say.

Eva laughs.

“I hate to break it to you, but we’re a lot more captive than they are. Look at her,” she says, pointing to the mother gorilla. “Does she look worried to you?”

I stand on my toes to look at Kibibi and her mother again. The little one is sucking on her mother’s breast, and her fingers are spread over the dark brown chest. Mandara, the mother, is neither bothered nor endeared—she just is.

Eva is right. If I were a gorilla, I wouldn’t have any of these issues. I wouldn’t have choices. It would all just be instinct. I would eat, or I would starve. I would mate, or I would sleep. I would live, or I would die. That’s it. No rituals—no funerals, no baby showers, no prayers. No art, no music.

It’s gotten so bad, I can’t decide if I’d rather be a gorilla.

“Are you ready to go?” Eva sounds impatient now. She’s found a bench and is staring at the rubbery plants in the foyer.

I’d like to stay a little longer, but I can tell her mood is changing, so I follow her and try to work up the courage to confess that I don’t have a new picture. I am here because she asked me to come. I’m here for her. Because I have her key in my pocket and her book in my bag, and because I want to know her story, since I’m now a part of it. She is Picasso, and I pushed her over. It’s my work to lift her back up.

I look up at the wires hanging over our heads for the orangutans to swing around on.

“Do your parents know about this?” Eva says suddenly.

“About the pictures?”

“About us.”

She’s looking at her shoes. I notice she’s not wearing any socks.

“They don’t,” I say.

Eva nods.

“Why do you want to know?” I ask.

“Never mind.”

“What?” I insist.

“Did they tell you not to come or something?” she says, her eyes on something too far away for me to see.

“I told you. They don’t know.”

“Okay, I got it. I thought you might be close to your parents.”

“I am,” I say.

“Okay, good, I just—”

“What makes you think I’m not? What makes you think they would want to know? I’m taking pictures of your house, so what? You basically blackmailed me.”

It all comes out fast, probably to flood the thing I’m afraid to say.

“I didn’t blackmail you.” She sounds upset. “You agreed to take the pictures.”

I bite my lip and breathe. I think of all the times I could have dropped out, from the planetarium to the house key, and how I always chose to go on. Maybe this is my fate, like Eva said on the first day. Whether in the Book of Life or the Book of the Dead, our names are written right next to each other. Eva and Miriam. Picasso and Paloma.

“You wanted to take the pictures,” Eva says softly, as if reading my thoughts.

“Maybe,” I say, “but I still don’t know why.”

“Because you can,” she says.

“What about you?”

“What do you mean?” she asks.

“You wouldn’t even have to take pictures. You could just walk right through that front door. Use your own key.”

I put my hand in my pocket, but I don’t take it out yet.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says, grimacing.

“You said so yourself. Everybody’s there. What are you doing here?”

“Watch the way you talk to me,” she hisses. “The real reason your parents don’t know about me is because you were too scared to tell them about the Picasso.”

I try to imagine the strongest thing I know. The ocean comes up first, but I’d rather picture something solid, something that stands still. I see the locust tree in Adam’s backyard. I am the locust tree, I think. She cannot move me. Eva sighs.

“Let me see the picture,” she says.

My spine grows longer.

“Please show me the picture,” she says.

“I don’t have anything,” I say.

She examines my face with her usual intensity.

“You’re lying,” she says.

I’m breathing short, thick breaths. Tree breaths. My tongue pushes hard against my teeth.

“I don’t lie,” I say.

“We know that’s not true,” she says.

“Not to you,” I say.

“But I asked you to please get a picture of Pablo,” she pleads. “I gave you a key.”

“I couldn’t,” I say.

“Why not?” she says.

“I was carving a pumpkin with my mother,” I say, as serious as I can be.

She looks up like she’s thinking hard, or trying hard not to think.

“That sounds nice,” she says.

“It was,” I say, surprised at how true that is, and how quickly she changed her tone.

“I loved my mother too,” she says.

“You don’t love her anymore?”

She looks horrified.

“Of course I do,” she says.

“Sorry,” I say.

“It’s okay. It’s just sometimes it’s not enough to love people.”

“I know,” I say. “But you should go home.”

And then again, “Go home.”

Eva starts crying. A lot. Silent, but a shit ton. Massive tears.

“You don’t know,” she says.

“It’s okay,” I say.

“It’s not.”

“Eva.”

“You don’t know what it’s like.”

“What?” I ask. “What?”

We’re stalled in front of the reptile house. A few kids are leaning over the rail looking for the alligator, but he’s well hidden. I can’t believe this is how I’m going to leave her.

“Don’t you want to see them all in real life, not in some pictures I took?”

“Are you going to take a picture?”

“Did you just leave, Eva?”

“I did,” she says. “I left. And now I don’t know how to go back.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m scared of what I did.”

“What did you do?”

“I got so mad.”

“You got mad? That’s why you left?”

“I couldn’t keep up with everything. Everything was changing. I was yelling a lot, and then promising not to yell, and then yelling again. I couldn’t stop. I was just mad.”

“What were you so mad about? Who were you yelling at?”

Eva sighs.

“What happened?”

I can feel the pull again now, the force of your life happening to you, the pull of our story, mine and hers.

“One morning, he wouldn’t get out of his pajamas, you know, to have breakfast. And I was so tired.”

“Pablo?”

“Yes. I don’t have to tell this story if you don’t want to hear it.”

“I want to know. I need to know.”

“Well, he kept asking if he could just eat breakfast in his pajamas, and I kept telling him no, and explaining why. He kept promising he wouldn’t spill anything, and that he would eat really quickly. I wanted to say yes, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I told him no and he screamed. I told him to be quiet and he yelled louder, right in my face.

“So I told him to be quiet again and go into his room, and he stomped his foot and he pushed me away. I grabbed him and put him in his room and told him to stop it, and he yelled more and more until my tía came in to see what was wrong. He just kept saying ayudame, ayudame, help me, help me, but I didn’t. I kept telling him he could do it himself. He ran down to the kitchen, and I just ran after him, yelling at the top of my lungs. He had the juice carton in his hands and he was getting ready to pour some, and I told him to put it back. He said NO. And then I just lost it. I hit him right across the face. Hard, Miriam. Right on his temple.”

She’s wiping the tears with her palm, but her voice is so steady, it’s as if the story and the tears aren’t even connected.

“He screamed so loud, I grabbed him again. Then I could see his little face getting scared, and I felt so horrible, but I couldn’t let go of his arms. He pulled, and I let go, and he hit the floor.”

I don’t know what to say, but I can tell she’s waiting for something.

“Did you say you were sorry?” I ask.

“Yes, and he just went on up the stairs and we put his clothes on. He lifted his feet to fit them through his pants. His cheek was swollen. I knew it would bruise. I could almost see it turning red, then purple, then yellow. I did that. But he was so quiet. He let me rinse his face with the washcloth, pull the dinosaur shirt right over his head. He didn’t say a thing. I told him it wasn’t nice to hit, and that you should never do it no matter how mad you are. He didn’t really respond. He just went downstairs and asked me for milk.”

“Okay, well then, it sounds like he forgave you, like everything was okay. Did you get in trouble? Was your mom pissed?”

My comment seems to amuse her slightly.

“He didn’t forgive me. He just went on. Because I’m big, and he’s only a little boy. I always thought I would protect him,”

“That’s good.”

“Yes, it’s good, but I hurt him instead.”

“You’re his sister. Sisters do that sometimes,” I say.

She looks at me and shakes her head.

“I’m sure everybody loses it. Doesn’t your mom yell at him?”

“My mother never yelled at anybody,” she says.

Her face twists into disgust, like she’s smelling something awful.

“She never even raised her voice.”

Neither did mine, or I can’t remember if she did. She pushed my legs off the back of the passenger seat once, and then handed me crayons before I could cry.

“I’m going to do it again,” she says. “Once you do it once, you just do it again.”

The tears are still coming, but the wiping has turned to scrubbing, her face a stubborn pot. I reach over and grab her wrist.

“Stop,” I say. “Your mom is there.”

“My mom is not there,” she says.

“But she is,” I say. “She’ll get better, won’t she?”

She doesn’t say anything.

“Look, I wouldn’t push the sculpture again,” I say. “I learned from my mistake.”

Eva jerks her hand away and reaches for the empty space around her waist. She grabs the end of her sweater and stretches it down toward her thighs.

“You don’t know, Miriam. You don’t know the feeling right after you do something like that. I know he got up. I know I love him. But I broke it. I broke something. I destroyed something. It was something, and then it wasn’t anymore. I destroyed it. I did that. It was safe and then it wasn’t. It was love and then it wasn’t. How could that be love? How could he believe me when I say that to him now?”

She looks away for a minute, catching her breath, considering her own dilemma. This seems like too much for a sister to take on.

“It was a mistake,” I say.

She shakes her head. “Maybe,” she says. “But you can’t go back. You can’t come back after some mistakes.”

I’d like to say that isn’t true, but I am not convinced. After all, I pushed the statue and I still haven’t told anyone. I lied to my parents. If I ever come back, I don’t know who it is they’re getting.

“You’re probably right,” I say.

“So then what am I supposed to do?” she says, a little aggressive.

I think about my parents. I think about Elliot. I see Adam in front of me, his shoulders, his neck, his grin. I want to destroy them all, but most of all, I want them to survive. As I picture that, I remember the statue, and how good it felt to push her, when she was still strong, before she fell over. How right it seemed to lean against her, to stun her out of her peace. I can see her looking at me like that, without eyes or a real face, looking like me looking at her, looking like me covered in bronze. I get it, I should say to Eva. I get why you hit your brother. But the words are stuck in the place where we manufacture them, rolling off the assembly line, making mischief in the room of my thoughts. Eva looks like she forgot the question.

“You know when people say they can’t stand something?” I say.

“Yeah.”

“What do you think they mean, exactly?” I ask.

“I don’t know. That they can’t take it, I guess. That they don’t know how to take it.”

“Right. I agree.”

“What are you trying to say?” she asks.

“That it’s not about hating something.”

“Is this about the sculpture?” she says.

I am not sure what it’s about.

“When something is precious,” I try, “people are always telling you to be careful with it, so you try to be. And that works for a vase or an antique, but not with a person.”

She is not looking at me, but she’s listening. I can tell.

“Because you can never really get close when you’re too scared to hurt someone. So, you should. Or maybe you shouldn’t. But we do.”

“Do what?” she says, releasing one hand and switching to the other.

“Hurt each other,” I say.

She turns her head. I see the puzzle on her face. I want to make her understand.

“So he knows you’re not perfect, so that you can survive it, so that it can all be real. Sometimes you can’t stand love, so you have to hurt it.”

That doesn’t make sense, but it feels exactly true. The words mean something I can’t understand yet. The words are doing their job without me, and I will just have to catch up later.

“So that you can actually love someone and they can love you,” I say, “even if you weren’t careful, even if you weren’t kind, even if you were exposed as the mean, selfish, ugly-ass thing that you are.”

She stares.

“Did you read that in a book?” she asks.

“Maybe,” I say, because everything comes from somewhere, right, and it may as well be a book.

She releases both hands from her sweater and rubs her knees with her palms. There’s a faint smile growing on her lips. It has a patronizing slant.

“Is that what you think you are?” she asks softly, but with a strange confidence.

“What?”

“A mean, selfish, ugly-ass thing?”

“I don’t know,” I say, trying not to blush.

“Thank you for the pictures,” she says.

I shrug.

“You may be right about all this stuff,” she says, “but you never really lost anything.”

A rush of heat fills my face, a flood of shame.

“Maybe not,” I say, “but it feels like I did.”

We sit there and watch the visitors roll by. A lion roars, somewhere farther away than it sounds. A boy runs to grab his father’s leg. They laugh. People let their children throw bread to the turtles in the pond. The keepers pretend not to see it. The silence between us is heavy, but I feel lighter. Everything is in relief. Eva suddenly stands and walks to a bench in front of the souvenir store. Two men beside us are weaving fake spiderwebs around a tree, debating what branches to dangle them from. Eva doesn’t see the men. She’s staring straight ahead. Her face is blotchy from all the crying.

“I’m such a fucking whiner,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay. I’m just not sure what to do. Do you need something?”

“Maybe some water would help,” she says.

“Okay. I can get that.”

I stand and look around for a vending machine. “Give me a minute. I’ll be right back.”

“Miriam?”

“Yes?”

“Every day I’m out here, it gets harder and harder to go back.”

I give her a quick look of solidarity, take out my wallet, and drop my tote on the bench as a security deposit, to show her I’m not leaving her.

Eva nods quietly and I head back up the hill. I’m going to find what this girl needs. I’m going to go back there. I’m going to take care of one thing at a time. I find a machine that asks for two fifty for a bottle of water. I slip the money into the slot and punch the blue logo.

The bathrooms are right next door, so I run in there. I wash my hands and steal a look at my face. Is it rounder? Is it tired? Then I remember the water, Eva, the bench. Focus.

When I get back, my bag is sitting right where I left it, but she’s not there. I look around at the fake waterfall and the kids huddled around to feed the turtles they’re not supposed to feed. No new sweater, no shiny hair. I head for the big cats, but she’s not there either. All I find is a tiger, pacing back and forth on the edge of the water. Wanting out.

At the bottom of the hill, there’s an exit and a big clock that’s stuck at 11:45. I look for my phone. It’s actually four-thirty. The walk back up the hill to my bike is unbearable: the hill is especially steep, and my breath is short from looking for Eva. The cheetahs are still napping. When I get to my bike, I call Eva and it goes straight to voicemail. That’s Pablo saying the numbers. So you hit your brother, Eva. What makes you think he’s better off without you? I’m going to do it again, she said. I take out the phone and text her.

i have your water.

Erase that.

where are you?

On the way home, the wind threatens to throw me off the bike a few times, especially on the way up from Connecticut Ave, past the zombies and jack-o’-lanterns and poisonous plastic spiders. I stop at the top of the hill to re-arrange my school stuff and switch sides. Bogart is gone. She took my camera.