Author Archives: Qu Literary Magazine

Damien had always hated coming into his parents’ bedroom—hollering good night from the doorway as she lay in a purple nightie, Pops spread-eagle in briefs like anybody wanted to see his hairy ass self. But Pops hadn’t stepped foot in his room for, what, a month? He put on a good show, faking like he hadn’t been sleeping in the recliner, shoving the comforter beneath the couch before Damien got out of bed each morning—Pops is stupid, D thought. He would’ve been in that room every night, every day just trying to catch a smell of her: sawdust, lavender, and cheap-ass detergent. All Damien wanted to do was pilfer. He’d pocket every damn thing if he could. He wouldn’t, maybe some things, no, what he liked about the room now was that, like, the light had changed. Not just the light but also the air. Like he’d stepped into a still life painting of his Moms without his Moms in frame, but still there, you know. Like how the first time he’d snuck in her room he noticed a painting, hidden behind a stack of windows his folks salvaged from a church and the windows stood tall, like, almost to the ceiling. He knew the painting. A Rembrandt he’d studied in honors history: a naked lady on the bed, the sheets crumpled and twisted. There was this dude creeping behind a curtain wearing a baggy-assed hat and maybe from the vantage point of a newcomer he was still unseen but she, Danae, she was all in light. The light was Zeus. His folks didn’t own shit like this, or even care about art and the Rembrandt didn’t add up to what he knew about his Moms. So, he kept coming back, pussyfooting, as his Pops called it, trying to learn more because fuck if he felt now that he had ever known a damn true thing.

D closed the curtains, wiped dirt from the sheets. On top of his mom’s dresser, crowded by dumb figurines—the poodle-shaped perfume dispenser, the dolphin swimming along ceramic waves, blue bottles with tiny mouths—were prescriptions, hand lotion, a Christie Mystery and two packs of Capris Slims. All as before. He used to love watching his Moms smoke, the way she blew out a thick white cloud and then sucked it up through her nose. French, she called it. Her voice, the smoke, it tore him up to remember, made his shoulders shake and snot drip from his nose, but he pilfered this too—the straight-bawling—from her room. The fuck ever, he thought, stuffing both packs in his pocket, revived now that he’d stolen something. Metal ringlets jingled when he pulled open each dresser drawer in turn. He was looking for surprises, like the Rembrandt, but hoping to find nothing save ordinary. The top two drawers, petite and inset, were full of cotton panties but his hand ran across something silken and lacey with alligator clips and he pulled it out all in one tangle. What the purple waistband was he didn’t know but the garter belt he recognized instantly. Durg’s sister, Penny, wore a black one around her neck like a collar. Penny’s neck was dark brown and long and thin and she always cut the necklines from her Cure t-shirts so that half her cleavage showed. He shoved the garter and lacey belt deep into his pocket and got the hell out. He didn’t want to think about Penny with his hand all up in his Mom’s panty drawer.

D pedaled the two miles over to the purple house that killed his mother, racing hard against the fall wind, cold-tears streaming down his face. He dropped his BMX at the backdoor and grabbed the key from beneath a frog-shaped planter and he let himself inside. When his Moms got sick, they’d been in the process of tearing out the walls, opening the place up so this tiny-ass house might have more flow (so different than his own crib where every square inch was taken up by random junk, like, old doors, tools, siding and sinks). Their construction firm had folded under the weight of Mom’s hospital bills but his Pops finished the job on his own, refusing to sell even though the market had spiked. His Pops had painted every room a different shade of purple. Even the exterior was violet and lavender; the living room mauve, the kitchen deep and the bathroom where the black mold had been was Royal. One room in every house they finished had been painted Royal, her signature. Know why it’s called that? When she asked, he’d been in the fifth grade and interested in invertebrates, the ocean. The color comes from the mucus of sea slugs. Only royalty had purple robes, you know.

D closed himself in the bathroom. His lungs opened—swoosh, like dropping down the water slide at Adventure River—and a crying jag hit him unawares but he sucked it back, snorting up the tears until he coughed. There was no black mold now. Men in biohazard suits had torn the rest of the bathroom away, ran tests on the entire house. That didn’t help D none. The mold had been hidden, no sign of it at all in that once dandelion-wallpapered room where everything was stained tawny from nicotine. When his Moms busted out the walls with her pink gorilla bar she did not know the mold was there. D thought about her coma, the pneumonia steadily beating down all antibiotics. It was the same, wasn’t it? No signs of dying showed on her face because all the sickness existed on the inside.

Standing in the tub next to a frosted window above the soap tray, Damien lit his first cigarette. The smoke went down harshly and he hacked. He practiced French, like Moms, collecting the smoke in his cheeks and letting it sift slowly out, trying but failing to suck the white cloud up through his nostrils. She made it look so easy. He tried, again. The toothpick-sized cigarette held daintily between his lips. He did not feel tough but weirdly sexual, like he was kissing it and suddenly with the urgency of having forgotten something very important he pulled out the garter and ran his fingers across the silky center, pinching it with his thumb. It was stretchy and the lace did not feel coarse, not the way he’d always imagined Penny’s garter to itch her skin, no, it felt soft and inviting. A dumbass thing, he thought, about Penny, to wear this around your neck. He was fighting off an image of his Moms acting sexy, of her standing nearly nude in a doorway. She’d once been young, like Penny. Before she’d had D, before she’d melded her desires with the house and work, she had wanted to be sexy for some dude. He’d never thought of his Moms as anything but an overbearing hard-ass that controlled his Play Station time and only let him stay over at Durg’s once a month. His Moms had pushed him to get into seventh grade honors, then eighth and now he was in all AP courses and he hated how little time he had for dicking off with Durg who was 100 percent Gen. Pop. And as he pulled his pants down and off, he did not try and stop the coming tears but let the snot bubble, let strings of saliva hang from his lips, falling, straight-nasty, like some living thing, like some sea slug bleeding purple. He slid the garter onto his thigh. It fit snugly, and the silk ran like cool water against his skin.

When he got home, Damien found Pops half-asleep on the recliner, Married With Children blasting from the TV. D avoided his sad eyes and threw himself down on the couch, heavy-like so his mood televised broader than Al Bundy. D was tired, too.

“What’s up with dinner?”

Pops pulled a cigarette free with his teeth and lit it. Smoke curled under his Lennon eyeglasses and he rubbed the ache away with a dirty fingernail. “See what’s in the kitchen,” he said. “Not hungry myself.”

You ain’t never hungry, man. His Pops was still wearing work clothes, ratty-old white tennis shoes, blue jeans covered in paint and joint compound, a flannel unbuttoned over a dark purple J and M Construction shirt—Jim and Molly. His Moms, Molly, had she been there, would make dinner. Tired and dressed identically as this lazy-ass man she would cook up some chicken or at least throw a pizza in the oven. Her face, dawg! Damn if he would cry in front of Pops. If he did, he knew what would come next: Pops kneeling, petting D like he was five years old. Nah, he told himself, just breathe through. But her face was there in his mind’s eye, her black hair, thin and shiny, making her pale skin look like paper, drawing out all those microscopic freckles around her eyes, copper with little flakes of gold all broken up like light reflecting off shards of broken glass. D stuffed his hands into his pockets, a protective reflex he’d owned since he was old enough to wear pants. With his hands hidden, no one could see him clench his fists, digging his nails into his palms until the pain grew intolerable. He felt the lumpy lace of his Mom’s garter belt around his thigh and this calmed him. He’d stolen one of her secrets and now that everything seemed so damn transparent he longed for secrecy, for some private knowledge only they shared.

His Pops snored in the recliner beside him, a Pall Mall burning down between his calloused fingers. Secrets, right? D reached into his bag and pulled out the stolen pack of Slims. Slowly, he brought a cigarette to his lips. Pop’s snore deepened when D grabbed the zippo and—chink-chink—sparked the flint. He let the flame hang close, but did not light up.

D stashed the Slims into his backpack and went to the kitchen to see about dinner. In the fridge, he found molded cheese, a sweating plastic bag with bologna inside. Durg had food. His fridge was always stocked. Penny might have some weed besides.

His best friend Freddy Durango was the only fifteen-year-old he knew that still wanted to play Magic the Gathering during sleepovers and when D came barreling through the basement door, unannounced and hollering like he was being chased by something Durg jumped, Nintendo controller ripping from the console, and bolted the door closed all like WTF.

“I’m just fucking with you.”

“Why you even here?”

“I’m hungry and your Moms probably ordered in from somewhere. Am I right? Right. What, like, pizza? Like hoagies? Nah. It’s Chinese.”

Durg nodded, told D there was Chow Mein from Royal Dragon.

When D came back down to the basement, carrying a to-go container of cold Chinese food, he asked after Penny. Durg didn’t pause the game or look up. “Where you think?”

D wanted to run to Penny’s door, ask after some weed or a DVD, acting like he could give a fuck if she wanted to share or not, if she wanted to be near him or not. D had to finesse his love for Penny so Durg never got jealous. So he shrugged his shoulders all, like, who cares and he ate the clumped, slimy noodles from Royal Dragon. He even sat for, like, ten minutes more after he finished just to prove to Durg he wanted nothing to do with his sister.

“I gotta piss,” D said and skipped from the basement up the stairs and into the little hall where Penny’s door stood across from the bathroom.He knocked, listened. A Cure poster hung above the knob and his ear almost touched Robert Smith’s mouth. He heard the rustling of Penny’s comforter and her soft padding across the room. “What?” her voice, dull and irritable, came from inside.

“Yo, it’s D. You hooked up?”

She opened the door. Her head barely reached Damien’s chin and he liked that she made him feel tall even though he was short. Her tiny fingers tugged at the lace band around her neck. D thumbed his own garter through the pocket of his jeans.

“I’m busy,” she said. D saw a pile of eyeballs and mouths cut from various magazines strewn across her bed.

“With what?” he asked.

“Don’t be a bitch, Pen,” Durg called from the basement.

Penny rolled her eyes. “Give me a minute.”

When she came out of her room, Penny demanded Durg stop playing Nintendo so she could watch Pulp Fiction.

“That movie is so damn stale, Pen.”

“My weed, my pick. Besides, you know you like Uma, Freddy. I see the way your hand disappears in your pockets when you watch Kill Bill. Next to your sister?That’s sick, hijo.”

Durg let out a long bratty-assed sigh before he shut down the system. He threw himself between D and Penny. Penny pulled a joint from behind her ear.

“We got to wait,” she said.

“For what?”

“For the Royal with Cheese.”

When Penny finally lit the joint, Samuel L. Jackson was quoting from the bible. But D had long since lost focus, the word Royal playing him like a yo-yo, bringing back memory upon memory like sneezing fits and he feared their disappearance, feared that each flash, bright—horribly fucking bright—would be lost. There weren’t enough memories, he thought. He was too young. What then, he asked himself a second time. When I’m old and stupid and tired and sitting in front of Married With Children—what will I remember of Mom? There was so much to remember and yet he was just a kid, he knew that, and he knew soon he’d be like his Pops, like his Moms was before she died—not young anymore, not a man who wanted his wife in lingerie, not like a woman who wore lacey garters.

He took Penny’s joint between his fingers, inhaled deep and did not cough. He was proud of this. Soon he was mired in a heavy high and Pulp Fiction ended and Durg was saying he wanted to go to bed, offering to set up a blow up mattress for D. But D said, no. Said he needed to get back home.

“Smoke one more with me.” Penny was smiling at him with this shy glance full of meaning and expectation that straight freaked D out because that’s the way he’d always wanted her to look at him since he was, like, nine years old. “Yeah, alright,” he said.

Durg scoffed, sulked off to his bedroom and slammed the door. Ever since Freddy and Damien had met in third grade Durg had feared D would like Penny more. Only recently had Durg’s suspicions drifted toward sex, attraction, no, before he just didn’t want D to start liking The Misfits and Shakespeare.

When Damien brought his attention back to Penny her face was so close he saw jittering wet in her eyes; her lips parted, showing bright, sharp teeth. “What’s it like?” she asked. “Our family is fucked up, but I can’t imagine—“

She passed D the joint. The smoke and rotting smell of cannabis wafting inches from his nose. He couldn’t bring himself to hit the weed, not yet, not if he was hearing Penny right. He felt everything, that’s how, and nothing.

“I’m sorry,” Penny said. “Stupid to ask.”

D shook his head. It wasn’t stupid to ask. And he wanted to tell her about the Rembrandt behind windows in his parents’ room, about the woman laid up in bed with her hand raised toward Zeus, presumably alone, but not alone. He wanted to ask Penny who she thought the person was, the one with the velvety toque. A spy? Collecting evidence to sell to the king? He knew the myth, knew Danae would be chucked into the sea, locked in a chest by a King more afraid of the Furies than Oracle’s prophesy. It fucked with D—the future awaiting Danae, the uncertainty of her survival. The painting was about secrets, about the lighted places and the shadows where little peeping-ass squires wait to blow the whole thing up. He looked at Penny, trying to form words, and she kissed him. Her breath tasted like ash and the cola she’d been drinking. He kissed her back, hard, like they’d kissed before but he hadn’t ever, like, with anybody. D felt, like, shaky and shit because he wanted her so bad and had for so long and yet she’d kissed him only after asking about his Moms and that made him angry and in some fucked switch-a-roo it also made him want her more. Penny straddled his lap, made hmmming noises when he touched her breasts. He pulled at the waistband of her shorts, tugging down from behind so that he could feel the sheen of her panties.

She grabbed his hands. “No.No.No,” she said, through scrunched together lips.

D didn’t listen. He was intent on feeling the hidden places where no one but Penny’s hand moved. She jerked her face away.

“Rule number one, asshole, and it’s better you learn from me,” she said. “Never keep going after a girl says no.” Her disappointment, her hurt: the taught jaw.

He shook his head—“Just forget it.” He tried to wiggle from beneath her weight.

“God!” Penny punched him in the chest but he didn’t feel pain. “You a freak, D.”

D eased into the dark kitchen, shutting the backdoor with a faint click.

“Don’t pussyfoot on my account.” He heard his Pop’s voice a second before a thick, hard hand clutched the meat of his upper arm and sent him crashing into the fridge. “Where the fuck you been? Too big to tell me when you go out?” Pops flipped on the light. Two large pizza boxes sat closed on the table. “Didn’t order this shit to go to waste.”

D could smell pepperoni and cheese and he wanted some. He wanted to sit in front of the TV and eat slice after slice until he was bloated and sick; Pops curled up in his makeshift bed on the recliner. He wanted to lean back and smoke, talk about how shitty The Braves were playing that season—Pass me the ashtray, son. D could not stop thinking about Penny, the smooth skin of her thigh. The smell of vanilla oil was all over him and he wanted so badly to be beneath her weight on the Durango’s couch.

“I ate,” Damien mumbled.

“What?” he said. “Speak up, man.”

“I’m not hungry, okay.”

“Oh, that’s funny. Last I heard you wanted dinner.”

The next morning, D walked inside Walgreens like he was eighteen, not fifteen and skipping school. He scanned the pharmacy aisle for Robitussin. All night he had dreamed of Penny and pizza and his father shoving him against the fridge, of his Moms: her eyes squinting with confusion and hurt. He wanted to make things right with Pops but they were so different—what was he supposed to say? He didn’t feel sorry, not really, no, he was straight-pissed. He wanted Pops to sleep in his room again and for Moms to drive him to school in the morning, shoving a gross-ass pack of lunchables into his hands like he was still nine years old. But with Penny he hoped, like, if he could just make her laugh then she’d forgive him. He could do that, right?

“Shouldn’t you be in school?” A woman around his Mom’s age stood at the cash register, pretty in her own right, with thick cleavage pushing out the top of a low cut dress. I got bird bones his Moms used to tell Damien. In memory, she wore a purple tank top, low cut and her ribs spread out from her sternum like the imprint of fingers drug across sand. Bird bones can’t hold curves like some women, or they’d break.

“For my mother,” Damien told the cashier. “She’s sick.”

D rode over to the purple house; the rhythmic tick-tacking of bearings in the hub of his back rim, as he coasted along narrow residential streets. He didn’t care if anyone stole his bike when he tossed it aside in the drive; didn’t care that he wanted a cigarette, desire in his chest. Not anymore. He knew he was the creep behind the drapes, that silly-ass jester watching Zeus’ coming light. What else could a fifteen-year-old boy do but peep grown up shit from shadows?

D thought about how he’d helped his Moms the day the realtor dropped off keys to the purple house. Pops was at the bank. She’d pounded plaster from the kitchen walls with her gorilla, Birdie, as Damien followed behind, popping lath off rough-hewn studs with a crowbar. Her mouth and nose was hidden behind a thin paisley bandana while a double filtered oxygen mask had dwarfed Damien’s head. In the bathroom now, he imagined knocking down walls. Swoosh. Smash. He imagined plaster raining down in giant clumps, rifts torn in dandelion wallpaper like flags among soot colored dust. This is how the mold had entered her lungs.

He lit a Slim and blew French.

“Damien?” Pops called. “You here?”

He hadn’t heard the door. He flushed the Slim. “Using the bathroom,” he said.

“Don’t clog the toilet. Prospectives always ask about plumbing.”

Prospectives? Prospectives meant couples with newborns, couples with no kids, or couples with five kids. Prospectives meant rich college students whose parents tagged along quietly in the background, making mental notes of all things wrong with the place.

D unlatched the lock.“Since when?”

“Just came back from the realtor’s office. It’s time.”

Pops sat on the floor across from D; head leaned against the wall, his beard thick with gray. The way his Pops looked now, eyes fixed upward, reminded D of when his Moms was in the hospital. She had tubes in her nose and mouth and her arms. She wore a thin paper-gown. Pops had asked the nurse to dress her in something comfortable but the nurse told him no. He had pushed past her and into a supply closet and dug through drawers, looking for scrubs. It had taken two security guards to cuff Pops to a chair and he’d banged his head against the wall, yelling, Get her out of that paper gown, goddamn it. Dress her comfortably. What if Pops never came back, D thought, never again slept in his old room? What if this man was his father now?

His Pops leaned forward, gripping Damien’s knee. “We’ll get through this. We will.”

D could see Penny reading in bed when he knocked on her window. She popped up, grabbing a baseball bat from behind her nightstand. “Escucheme, pendejo! Step off!”

“It’s Damien.”

“The fuck, D? I was about to roll your ass. Come to the door like a normal person.”

He pressed the bottle of Robo to the window and said, “Let’s trip, Pen.”

She was waiting for him in the basement. Durg was immersed in some upper level Sonic the Hedgehog D had never before seen. Freddy loved the old systems: Nintendo, Sega. Hell, the fool even played Atari.

“Don’t you have other friends?” Penny asked.

“If we ever make out,” D said. “I promise I will not touch you.”

Durg threw down his controller mid game and stood like he was about to swing on D but he didn’t step—“What the fuck you just say to my sister?”

“It’s cool Freddy,” Penny said. “It won’t ever happen, again.”

Freddy was all red faced and Penny was still looking like come on motherfucker. Tell me why I should be nice? D tossed Robos to each of the siblings. He threw himself on a round papasan. He hated this fucking chair because the dog slept there and once, back like when they were in fourth grade, D had found a turd.

“What the hell is this?” Durg asked.

D didn’t answer. He popped the childproof seal and downed the bottle in one extended gulp. The stuff tasted acrid, sweet. “Cheers, bitches.”

They watched him, anger slipping away until he saw a little shimmer of oh-it’s-on-now! Penny bit into the plastic seal, pulled it away with her teeth. D watched Freddy. The less he saw Penny do anything with her mouth the happier he’d be, like, forever. Durg downed his bottle and snatched up his controller, dragging out his anger. “Don’t fuck with my sister, dawg.”

“You ain’t my Papi, guey. I want to fuck D, you don’t have a say.”

“I’m not talking to you, Pen. I’m telling D how it is.”

All Damien heard was fuck. He told himself Penny didn’t mean it that way. She’d accidentally dropped a couple prepositions—to fuck with—by accident. D curled into the shit-stained ottoman, slipping his hands into his pockets. He was still wearing the garter.

When the Robo kicked in all color and sound ballooned and D could not hold onto any true thing—his Moms planting seeds in the garden. She wore a sun hat. She wore brown shorts. A wheelbarrow. Manure. On her wrist, a watch glinted in the sun—Birdie burst through plaster and stayed—she drove with the radio playing oldies, laughing and tickling D. Car dance, Damien! She wiggled her arms back and forth and he giggled as the singer crooned in high falsetto about the jungle. He couldn’t hold on, like, choking. He coughed, a captured spike. It was too much, the rolling dreams. D covered himself with an afghan pulled from the back of the papasan and watched the room through holes in the cross-stitch. He curled deeper into the blanket. Purple dots popped in the darkness and if he squeezed his eyes shut, bigger explosions pulsed. The purple air grew humid and he giggled and the giggling spread through his body and turned to strong and unstoppable laughter. Sweat slipped from his chin. He saw light. When he slipped headfirst from the folds of the afghan and his head crowned he saw his mother’s face over her belly, bloodshot and wet with tears. The air caught on his skin. He screeched. And he fell to the floor with a hard, weighted thunk, The room blurred, brightened until it nearly broke apart with light and there was Penny and Durg, arms touching as they watched Sonic stand motionless, shrouded in a sparkling sphere.

“Let’s get out of here,” Damien said and ran from the basement before either sibling had a chance to stand.

Mica shimmered up at him from the black asphalt. Houses with two, sometimes three levels stood on elevated yards. The night was cool and Penny was without a jacket. She rubbed her arms. Durg rapped under his breath, repeating the same harmony again and again, mouthing vowels, sound without meaning.

They reached a set of railroad tracks—a distant car alarm. A crack of white light unzipped the dark. He lit a Slim and watched smoke drift upward. His Mom’s satin garter felt chilly and tight against his skin. The ground vibrated with the weight of an oncoming train. When the engine came into view, everything succumbed to the sound of passing freighters. D stepped closer, feeling the wind as it moved through his hair and pushed through his sinuses and pressed against his closed eyes. He waited, trying to determine the break between cars by listening to the change in rhythm—a solid WOOSH before a hollow WISH. WOOSH–WISH. A hand grabbed through the darkness and held onto his arm. He opened his eyes briefly and saw Penny. Durg was slouching, arms crossed over his chest but he too had shut his eyes. The engine, beyond them now, blew a whistle that cut through the racket of steel wheels on track. Penny squeezed, her fingers cold. Fainter still, the train whistle blew. Blew again.

“Mom. We have to save the rainforests.”

These were the seven words with which my seven-year-old greeted me as she climbed into the minivan in the Pittsburgh Zoo parking lot.

I swiveled around in the driver’s seat, trying to get a good look at her face. Her piercing blue eyes stared solemnly back at me from beneath the bill of her puff-painted baseball cap, her blonde pigtail braids hanging ragged by her ears. I opened my mouth to ask what on earth this was about, but the other kids I was carpooling clamored into the car and I knew it was useless to try to talk over their raucous chatter.

By the time I’d dropped off the other kids, I’d forgotten her strange comment. As I pulled away from the Rosen’s driveway, I glanced at her in the rearview mirror. She was gazing out the window with her usual glazed look, but I noticed a single tear working its way down her cheek.

“Alison? Are you okay, baby?” I asked, casting my eyes back on the road. She didn’t answer. “Did something happen at camp today?”

“I told you already.” Her voice had an edge to it. “We have to save the rainforests.”

Oh. That.

“They told you that at camp?”

“Millions of species are losing their homes, Mom,” she went on, and when I glanced at her in the mirror again I saw that she was still staring out the window. “The rainforests will all be gone by the year 2000. That’s only six years from now.”

I inhaled deeply through my nose and released a slow breath, thinking of my mother’s words when she’d handed Alison back to me in the delivery room. She’s got an old soul, this one.

I don’t know if I believe in reincarnation, but there was definitely something heavier, older, about Alison. As a baby, she watched her older sister Charlotte running around, her little forehead wrinkled in somber concentration. Sometimes I would watch her as she stared into space and wonder what could possibly be going on in that little head of hers. Her later acquisition of speech didn’t assist me much in answering that question.

I glanced back at her again, noting another tear dripping down her cheek.

“So… you’re… really upset about this, huh,” I said slowly.

She finally turned to look at me in the mirror, and her glare was answer enough.

*

The phone rang shortly after bedtime. I sighed and tossed my pen onto the desk, sitting back to give the tax forms a despairing once-over before getting up to answer.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Mrs. Krieger?”

“Yes?”

“Hi, how are you? This is Cindy. I’m Alison’s counselor at zoo camp.”

I clenched the receiver a little tighter and slipped into the stool by our breakfast bar.

“Good, how are you?” I responded mechanically.

“I’m great, thanks! I was just calling to check in on Alison. She seemed pretty upset today.”

“About rainforests? She said something in the car…”

“Right… so… today was Rainforest Day. Most of the day she had a great time. It was just at the end, see, we put on this little movie for the kids… just a cute informational video about rainforest conservation, and it had images and sounds from the rainforest.”

“And she found it upsetting?”

“Well—not the video itself—see, we have a Moluccan cockatoo in the classroom, named Barney, and when the video came on, with the jungle sounds, you know, he started making this sort of mournful crooning noise. And then the other counselor—Meg—threw out a comment that he was crying because he missed his home, and…”

“Oh…”

“Yeah, so, Alison got real upset after that. I had to sit with her for a while and calm her down.”

I sighed. “She’s… a really intense kid.”

“Yeah. She seemed okay afterward, but still kinda sad, so I just wanted to make sure she’s okay.”

I glanced toward the staircase, chewing my lip. “Thanks for calling, Cindy.”

*

Alison had more of a bounce to her step the following morning, and I felt a wave of relief when I heard her singing to herself over her cereal. As my husband turned away from the coffee machine in the kitchen, I caught his eye and jerked my head toward the breakfast bar. He raised his eyebrows in a look of I told you so. I’d spent more time than I care to admit chewing his ear off the night before about Alison and her emotional intensity. I even raised the question of whether we should take her to therapy. Max had been dismissive, which annoyed me, but maybe he’d been right.

That afternoon, after camp, I took the girls to the library. Charlotte headed straight for the middle grade section, but Alison wandered off toward the adult reference books. I cocked an eyebrow, but said nothing. Alison was an advanced reader for a seven-year-old, but normally she would stay close behind Charlotte, collecting her sister’s rejects.

I should have guessed what she was looking for. She tottered back under the weight of three enormous volumes about rainforests, and spent the rest of the afternoon shut up in her room reading them.

*

On the last day of zoo camp, she dragged me to the spider monkey enclosure, insisting that she needed to show me something before we left. She skidded to a halt and pointed to the wall opposite the monkeys. There was a large digital screen with numbers that were rapidly falling. The placard next to it explained that the numbers represented the number of acres of rainforest that still existed.

“By the year 2000, they’ll be gone,” Alison whispered, her eyes wide. “I don’t want to live in a world that doesn’t have rainforests.”

I closed my eyes and swallowed. This was starting to get even more annoying than my sister’s self-righteous lectures about the meat industry. Come to think of it, I thought, maybe she and her Aunt Judy should hang out and bemoan global warming together.

Then I looked back into my daughter’s eyes, which were welling with tears.

“Can you help me save them?” she whispered.

“I…” I stuttered. “Baby, I’d really like to, but I don’t know…”

“Are any of our tables made from rainforest wood?”

“What?”

“The counselors said that one thing we can do to save the rainforests is not buy things made out of rainforest wood.”

“Oh. Well, I’m pretty sure we don’t have anything like that. Rainforest woods are pretty expensive.”

Her shoulders relaxed a little at that, and she turned around to watch a spider monkey deftly swing from a tree branch and cling to the netting at the top of the enclosure.

“They’re my favorite,” she said.

*

A few days later, Judy and I sat on the back porch, sipping iced tea and watching our kids play Red Light, Green Light in the grass. Judy sighed, lifting her dark curls from the back of her neck and resting the ice-cold glass against her skin, which was dripping with sweat. I chewed my lip, wondering whether I should tell her about Alison’s newfound rainforest obsession. On the one hand, Judy’s vegan smugness might swell to unprecedented and dangerous levels. On the other hand, Alison had been talking and reading about nothing else for several days, and despite my own discomfort with all this environmentalism stuff, I wanted to encourage her to follow her passions. If anyone knew concrete things Alison could do to save the rainforest, it would be Judy.

Fortunately, Judy made the decision for me.

“What’s going on with Alison lately?” she asked, as if she’d read my mind. “She’s been even more taciturn than usual.”

“She’s…” I sighed. “Upset about the rainforests.”

Judy looked at me with an eyebrow raised. “Rainforests?”

I told her the story about the bird at zoo camp, and as predicted, the corners of her mouth pricked up in that distinct smug look. I suppressed the urge to roll my eyes.

“So,” she said. “You’ve got a little environmentalist on your hands.”

“Don’t be so damn pleased with yourself.” I slapped at a mosquito on my arm, but missed it. “So… what do I do with her?”

Judy looked out over the lawn, her eyes following Alison’s progress toward Danny’s turned back. “Well, you know what I’m going to say.”

“That’s why I’m asking you.”

Judy gave me a scrutinizing look. “Really?”

“Yeah. I think I should encourage her. Contrary to what you may believe, I don’t actually hate the planet.”

Judy smirked. “How the mighty have fallen.”

“Quit gloating and just tell me how my kid can save the rainforest.”

Judy sat back in her chair, rubbing the rim of her glass against her chin.

“There are campaigns and organizations you can donate to,” she said. “Forest rehabilitation, lobbying for governments to do more to stop deforestation, stuff like that.”

“Yeah, but that’s all grown-up stuff, isn’t it?”

“She could set aside some of her allowance. Or maybe could organize some kind of fundraiser.”

I snorted at that. “A fundraiser? She’s seven years old, Judy.”

“Yeah, but she’s also Alison.”

“And? Have you ever seen her say more than two words to a stranger? You think she’s going to organize a fundraiser?”

Judy gave me a thoughtful look. “If I know anything about that kid,” she said, “it’s that she’s a determined little critter and she’ll do whatever’s necessary if she wants it enough. She may have inherited Max’s introversion, but she also inherited your stubborn ass.”

“You got a problem with my stubborn ass? You can kiss it.” I picked an ice cube out of my otherwise empty glass and lobbed it at her. Before I knew it we had both poured the remainder of our ice down each other’s shirts and were gasping from cold and laughter.

*

Judy was right, though. The minute I suggested the idea of raising money for a rainforest conservation campaign, Alison’s eyes lit up. She ran up to her room and came back with one of the books she’d borrowed from the library, pointing to a list of organizations in the back. Charlotte, never one to be left out of a new enterprise, suggested setting up a lemonade stand on Murray Avenue.

And so, in the worst of the muggy August heat, we schlepped a card table, a cooler full of ice, our juicer, and several bags of lemons and sugar down the few blocks to the corner of Beacon and Murray. Passersby and the patrons of the nearby storefronts glanced at us in polite curiosity as we set ourselves up by the curb. Alison quickly got frustrated when the sugar didn’t dissolve well and I was gearing up to face a full-blown crisis, but then Charlotte somehow rigged up an ingenious little solar oven from aluminum foil and managed to make sugar syrup right there on the sidewalk.

Within ten minutes, people were lining up by the stand. As I might have predicted, Charlotte took charge, chatting up customers and taking their money while barking orders to Alison about appropriate proportions of ice and lemonade. I almost stepped in and asked Charlotte to tone down the big-sister tyranny when a woman with cropped gray hair and a silk floral blouse finally asked why the sign we had hung read “Lemonade for the Rainforest”—and it was Alison who spoke up.

“The rainforests are the lungs of the world.”

All eyes turned on her in astonishment.

She looked the woman straight in the eye and went on: “The Amazon rainforest produces more than 20% of the world’s oxygen,” she rattled off, “and absorbs about 25% of the world’s carbon dioxide. Rainforests are also home to half of all the 10 billion species in the world and about one-fifth of the world’s fresh water lies in the Amazon basin. But they are being destroyed very quickly and by the year 2000 they will all disappear and all those animals will lose their homes, and lots of people, too, if we don’t do something.”

There were a few moments of shocked silence. It didn’t surprise me one bit that she’d memorized those figures, but I don’t think I’d ever heard so many words come out of Alison’s mouth all at once, much less to a perfect stranger.

“Well, young lady,” the woman finally said, “that sounds very important.”

“It is. And a $5 donation to the Rainforest Foundation saves a whole acre of forest.”

“And you’re donating all your proceeds to the Rainforest Foundation?”

“What are proceeds?”

“The money we make,” Charlotte cut in with her most patronizing drawl, “duh.”

“Charlotte,” I warned.

“Yes,” Alison said to the woman. “That’s what we’re doing.”

“I’ll take one,” said the woman, drawing a $50 bill from her purse. “And you go on and donate the change to the Rainforest Foundation.” She handed the bill to a wide-eyed Charlotte. Alison looked completely unfazed as she poured the cup of lemonade and offered it to the woman.

“The Rainforest Foundation thanks you for your contribution,” she said evenly. I covered my mouth to stifle a giggle.

The woman looked at me and smiled. “What a charming little girl you have.”

Charlotte pouted at her receding back.

*

I helped them count their earnings at the end of the day. Even deducting the cost of the sugar and lemons, we were all delighted to discover that they had $214 to send the Rainforest Foundation. I took the cash and wrote a check, and Alison helped me address the envelope and drop it in the mailbox in front of the O’Conners’ house.

“Can we go to the zoo tomorrow?” Alison asked, skipping back up the path to our front porch, her blond braids bouncing.

“You haven’t had enough of the zoo for this summer?” I said weakly, letting my eyes close in exhaustion at the mere thought.

“I need to check the numbers near the spider monkeys.”

It took me until we were inside the house before I registered what she meant.

“Alison,” I said. She stopped skipping across the living room and whirled around to face me. “I… you mean you want to check that screen? The one with the number of acres…?”

She nodded.

“I want to see how much we helped.”

My stomach plummeted and I swallowed, studying her face.

“Sweetheart…” I said, measuring my words carefully, “the check is in the mailbox right now. It will take a while before it gets there.”

“How long?”

“Maybe a week or two…”

“So can we go in a few weeks?”

“Alison…” I said slowly, still struggling to figure out how to explain this to her. “I don’t think you’ll be able to see any difference.”

Alison’s eyes narrowed and she searched my face, her lips pressing together in a frown.

“Your two hundred dollars will help a lot, I’m sure,” I said quickly, “but it will take a great deal more than that to… really… change those numbers.”

“But… the Rainforest Foundation says that $5 saves a whole acre.”

“Yes…”

“So how many acres will $214 save?”

“That’s… more than 40 acres,” I calculated quickly. “That’s a lot!”

“Then why won’t it change the numbers?”

“Well… because… there are millions of acres of rainforests. And thousands being destroyed every day, maybe even tens of thousands. But besides,” I said quickly, before the enormity of what I was saying could sink in, “I don’t think that board really shows how many actual acres are left. I think it’s… just an estimation. A guess.”

She stared at me long and hard.

“If we need more money,” she said, “then we’ll do more lemonade stands. I can do one every day until the end of the summer.”

I closed my eyes and pressed my lips together, drawing a deep breath through my nose.

“Alison, sweetheart,” I said gently, “even if you do a lemonade stand every day for a year…” my voice trailed off, and I struggled to explain. “People donate millions of dollars to these organizations… they’re doing what they can… it’s not just the money, these are government policies, and people’s livelihoods, and… baby, it’s just… it’s very complicated adult stuff.”

She looked away, her jaw set and her eyes brimming with tears. For a long moment, she didn’t speak at all. It felt as though I were watching her childhood crumble into dust around her.

Finally she met my eyes again.

“If it’s adult stuff, then why aren’t the adults doing anything?” she demanded, her voice strained. “I’m the one who’s going to have to grow up in a world without rainforests. Don’t you care?”

I stared at her feet, wanting desperately to disappear into the carpet. When Judy would ask me, Don’t you care? I would just roll my eyes and whine to Max about how obnoxious and emotionally manipulative these hippies were. Judy and I grew up playfully scoffing at everything the other did; it was how we established our autonomy and our place in the family. But Alison’s question cut through me, cut through the irritation and the exasperation and the denial, and opened up a chasm of shame and guilt.

Maybe they’re right. Maybe I don’t care. Maybe I’m going to be leaving a trashed, barren, and broken planet for my kids and I’m too afraid of that to even think about it, too afraid of the abject powerlessness and hopelessness I would feel if I were to face it, and here is my little girl standing here asking me why I am doing nothing.

“You told me I could do something,” Alison choked, tears splashing down her face. “You said you’d help me save the rainforests.”

“Baby,” I said in a small voice, “I didn’t say—”

“Why did you tell me you’d help me if I can’t? I can’t save the rainforests. Even you can’t save them. Why didn’t you just tell me that?”

“Honey, listen to me,” I pleaded, crouching to her eye level and placing a hand on her shoulder. I took a deep breath and looked into her eyes. “You’re right, no one person can save the rainforests. It’s something a lot of people all have to do together. We can’t make everybody else do what we want, but we can do our part and encourage others to do theirs, and hope that our efforts will all come together to make a difference. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

She just gave me that deep, piercing look, and it made me wither inside.

“You lied to me,” she whispered, and then bolted past me and up the stairs.

I sank into a nearby armchair, held my head in my hands, and wept.

*

Six summers later, Alison sat at the breakfast bar, munching on Cheerios and holding a book open with her elbow.

“Honey, please don’t read at the table,” I said, stirring some milk into my coffee. She looked up and glared at me through her heavy black eyeliner, but she closed the book and slid it away from her bowl.

“Mom?” she asked, swallowing a bite of cereal.

“Yes?”

“Are the rainforests still around?”

I turned to her, startled. She hadn’t said a word about the rainforests since that day in ‘94. She was watching me, her expression unreadable, and though she was now a thirteen-year-old sporting a tight baby doll T-shirt, a messy high ponytail, and way too much eye makeup, the image of that little girl with the pigtail braids staring up at me in despair and anger flashed vividly before my eyes.

“I… I think they are,” I stammered. “Yes, there are certainly still rainforests.”

“It’s the year 2000.”

I blinked, trying to figure out what that had to do anything.

“The video. At zoo camp. They said that the rainforests would all disappear by the year 2000.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well… maybe all that campaigning worked. Maybe they managed to stop people from cutting down so many trees. Maybe your $214 did something after all!”

“Or maybe,” Alison cut in, her voice sharp, “they were lying.”

She dove back into her cereal before I could get a look at her face.

“I don’t think they were lying,” I said slowly. “Maybe they miscalculated, or maybe something changed—”

She met my eyes again, and the look she gave me stopped me cold.

“The Moluccan cockatoo,” she said, “isn’t even from the Amazon, it’s from Indonesia. The video was filmed in the Amazon. I bet Barney wouldn’t have recognized those sounds, because the species of birds and monkeys in those places are different.”

I just watched her, clutching my coffee cup.

“Why,” she said quietly, “do adults lie about everything?”

She slid off the bar stool, grabbed her book, and huffed off.

I didn’t even try to call her back to clear her bowl.