The Summer Prince Page 8

  “A demonstration,” he says.

  “You know the water is twenty meters beneath us, right?”

  He stops his wild swinging and reaches for my free hand. I’m terrified, but I relax a little when he twines his fingers in mine. This isn’t the first time — sometimes Enki just likes to touch — but it never gets any easier. In my head, the two of us are all and only about art, but that doesn’t stop my skin from tingling and my stomach from leaping into my throat. I’ve gotten good at ignoring it. With his other hand, he reaches for the crab, still struggling weakly.

  “Now watch,” he says, and puts the crab down on the cliff face.

  It tries to scramble into a hole but Enki shoos it away. Enki herds it, until it goes farther down the cliff edge. And he follows.

  Of course, he’s still holding my hand and he won’t let go. My arm stretches. I shriek, but he doesn’t even look at me.

  “You bastard!” I yell, but even then I’m detaching a boot, planting it on the rock, detaching the other —

  — all so I can walk down a cliff face at the behest of the summer king.

  “You are insane!” I say, and he just laughs.

  I think he wants to run, but he can’t with me along, and I don’t know whether I should feel grateful that he won’t leave me alone or terrified. The poor crab doesn’t know what to do. Enki shoos it away from every hole, every other direction it might want to go except for down, down, down.

  And then something very strange happens.

  We hit a part of the cliff that’s smooth and sheer, straight down to the water below. It’s not any harder for our nanohook boots. Scared as I am, I don’t even think about the sudden lack of pitted rock and protuberances. But the crab, that poor crab scuttles and slides, straight down the cliff face and into the water below.

  Enki and I turn to each other at the same moment. “You knew that would happen?” I say.

  He shrugs. “I just guessed.”

  I look back down. The crab was swimming a moment before, but now it’s disappeared. “They climb up through the rock,” I say.

  “Which means it’s probably honeycombed with passages.”

  “We can just thread the lights through it! Light it up from the inside!”

  Enki closes his eyes for a moment. As if the world has turned too beautiful for him to even look at. My hand tightens around his, and I look for both of us.

  “Should we jump?” he says.

  His eyes have opened again.

  “Enki …”

  “Come on, June,” he says. “Sometimes you have to step out.”

  That’s what Gil says. I wonder if that’s where he first heard it.

  I know he’s expecting me to plant my feet in the rock and refuse to do anything so dangerous. But he’s right, and I’ve done so many crazy things these past few months I don’t see how I can draw the line here.

  “We won’t cut ourselves on the rock?”

  “Nah, see the dark blue? It’s one of the deepest parts of the bay.”

  “All right.”

  Enki lets off a yell loud enough to send a few birds on the rock above screeching away.

  “On three,” he says. My thighs are burning from the effort of holding myself horizontal for so long. The sun is hot and sizzling on my exposed neck and arms. Enki’s hand is as warm as a lamp beneath mine.

  My heart feels like it might explode.

  He counts steady and slow. I’m ready — if we don’t do this at exactly the same moment, we’ll need a medic to get us off the island.

  I feel his three like a heartbeat.

  For a moment I am empty. For a moment I am flying and I am flying and Enki is the other me at the end of my arm and the blue of the water above us is the same as the sky below.

  Our shouts echo in tandem. A defiant scream at the Aunties and the Queen and every grande in Palmares Três.

  We hit the water. We plunge deep inside, and I’m shocked at how icy it is despite the searing heat of the sun above. I open my eyes. Enki’s hair billows around him like sea anemones. A few feet away from us, fish nibble on a bed of seaweed. And crabs — dozens and dozens of green crabs just like the one Enki chased down here — crawl in and out of the gaping holes in the rock.

  Underwater, sound is strange. All I can hear is close and far away. My heartbeat and Enki’s, pounding like ceremonial drums. A pod of dolphins calling to one another too far out to see. The sunlight filters down in streams so clear they look like bars of gold.

  Enki runs his hand through the cloud of my hair. He smiles, because Enki thinks the world is beautiful.

  I kick first and he follows me, up through this quiet, sun-streamed world and back into the air. I gasp when we break the surface, get a little of my breath back, all so I can laugh.

  I rub the brackish bay water from my eyes. “That … was … amazing!”

  Enki smiles. “Happy Christmas, June.”

  I’d forgotten. Most Palmarinas don’t celebrate it, though I’ve heard that in Salvador there are traditional Catholics who celebrate it like carnival. Maybe that’s why Enki gave me the present of this day: for the memory of his mother’s home, in the summer of our own.

  Gil comes over that evening for our monthly family dinner. Mother has insisted upon it since Papai’s death, no matter how much I protest. I think at this point she does it to spite me. Gil comes when he can to help lessen the tension, but today I dread the upcoming two hours of stilted conversation and waylay him on the stairs to our house.

  “What do you say we ditch and find a bloco party in Founders Park?”

  He perches on the end of the railing and pretends to consider. “I don’t think it’s anyone good tonight.”

  “It could be a howler monkey, Gil, I’d still dance.”

  “Bad day?”

  I think about Enki under the water, and my hair, which has dried into a saltwater Afro I refuse to comb out.

  “It’s been sort of perfect.”

  Gil tilts his head. He knows I’ve been out with Enki today, and the considering look in his eyes makes me say nervously, “Just our project. It’s going to be amazing.” I don’t want him to think there’s anything more than that between me and Enki.

  He leaves it alone. “And what makes you think this will be any less?”

  “Mother? Auntie Yaha? You’ve heard of them?”

  “Could be worse. You get to spend an evening with three people who love you.”

  My expression could make one of his sunflowers turn away, but Gil just meets it, eyebrows raised higher than my own. “Well, at least I love you, menina, so it’ll have to do.”

  “Oh,” I say, “you’re smoother than glass. Let’s get this over with.”

  I don’t tell him how happy his words make me. That’s not how Gil and I work.

  Besides, he knows anyway.

  Mother is sitting at the table when we walk in, sipping red wine with her thick, loosely curled hair uncharacteristically down. Auntie Yaha lights actual wax-burning candles. Even I’ve noticed how hard she’s been trying since I confronted her about the Queen’s Award. I can’t bring myself to appreciate it.

  “Gil!” she says, and kisses him on both cheeks. “We’re so glad you could come.”

  “Yes,” says Mother. “You’ve been so busy lately.”

  I glare at Mother, noting the hint of disapproval in her tone, but Gil just smiles. “Never too busy for June.”

  Auntie Yaha gives one of her smoothing-over chuckles and then we all sit down. Gil could have a bright future as a diplomat if it weren’t for the dancing.

  Well, that and his flamboyant choice in sexual partners.

  He and Enki have hardly been exclusive with each other in the last two months, but they remain the golden couple of all the gossip casters. I can always tell when Gil’s been with Enki, because he moves like he might start dancing at any moment and he hardly hears a word I say to him.

  Enki, on the other hand, is a cipher. The gossip casters say he’s wit
h someone nearly every night, but I wouldn’t be able to tell from his demeanor with me. He almost never mentions Gil, and when he does, I can’t tell how he feels about him. I can hardly tell how Enki feels about me. Not that I care, so long as we get to make our art together.

  Gil asked me once if Enki loved him. I said that maybe summer kings don’t feel things the way we do. Maybe with everything so compressed and escalated, he can’t really love like a human with another two hundred years in front of her. That made Gil cry, so I stopped talking.

  I can smell the food — hot peppers and coconut milk and stewed shrimp and that unmistakable musk of palm oil for deep-frying — but the table is bare. Instead, Mother holds out her hands to either side and after a shocked moment I realize that she means for us to join hands. All of us. Together.

  Auntie Yaha leads by example and holds Mother’s and Gil’s hands. Gil gives me a little smile and I hold his and Mother’s.

  A circle, complete.

  “I thought we’d give our thanks,” Mother says.

  We are hardly a religious family. The last time I’ve even seen the inside of a city shrine was a week after Papai died. When he was alive, sometimes Papai would lead us in a song, usually a Christian hymn or a song for Yemanjá, so we could “honor our ancestors.” No one took it very seriously — Papai just loved music, and we’d humor him.

  I want to refuse, but Mother looks deadly serious and I can’t bear to make this go sour so early. So I duck my head.

  “Yemanjá and Ogum, divine orixás who have blessed this city, may you also bless my daughter, and guide her through these pivotal moments, so that she might keep the gifts of her youth and gain the wisdom of her elders. May she not squander her great opportunities on pursuits she might later come to regret. May she reach her full flower as the composed, polished adult I know she can —”

  “Mamãe!”

  I rip my hand from her increasingly tight grip. Her head snaps up and we glare at each other — she wants to intimidate me, but I’m her daughter, and I learned how to match her years ago.

  “It’s a blessing, June.”

  “Sounded like a lecture to me.”

  “Well, how else can I make you listen?”

  “I promise, I’m not listening.”

  “Your papai —”

  I stand. The chair rocks on its legs, the only sound in the room. “You will not. Not him.”

  Auntie Yaha puts her hand on my shoulder. I shake it off. “June,” she says, “honey, just sit down, okay? We don’t have to talk about any of this if you don’t want to.”

  I can’t take my eyes off Mother. “She’s the one who started it!”

  “You’re the one who was nominated for the most prestigious award in the city and won’t lift a finger to win it! Do you know what your stepmother has been going through at work because of your neglect?”

  “Valencia, don’t —”

  “Someone has to say it, Yaha. June has been squandering everyone’s goodwill and all of her talent. She has us walking on eggshells around her because of her papai, and I’m done!”

  “Stop talking about Papai!”

  “Why, June? I lost him too.”

  The blood rushing past my ears sounds like the ocean, that noisy quiet with my heartbeat buried inside. I feel Gil’s hands on my shoulders. He guides me away from the table. My feet follow.

  I don’t know where we’re going. I can’t think. It’s been so long since I’ve seen my papai, sometimes his face blurs in my memory. I can’t remember if he had a mole in front of his left ear or right, or how long his mustache was. But sometimes I hear his voice. He tells me not to care what others think. He says, “Find your own fulfillment, June,” and usually this makes me happier, only now I can’t stop shaking.

  Gil has taken me outside, to our tiny garden that a woman from the verde comes to weed and water twice a week. It’s not near as nice as Gil’s, but anything is better than that dining table and its wax-burning candles.

  Gil doesn’t say anything. He just holds me as we look across the bay. The sun has mostly vanished, but in its lingering glow we can see the humps of the four siblings like sleeping gods. I imagine how they will look when Enki and I are done with them, and something in me manages to smile. They’ll be worthy of Papai. He would be proud of me, I’m sure of it, the opposite of Mother and her endless opprobrium.

  Gil looks at me. He pulls at the end of one of my curls and flicks off the crusted salt.

  “Feel better?”

  “I hate her.”

  “I know, menina.”

  “I told you they don’t love me.”

  Gil just sighs, and I wonder why he’s so sure they do.

  “Have you thought of telling them why you’re not doing anything for the Queen’s Award?”

  “Yaha is an Auntie. The whole point of this is to create the art before they can stop me, and then reveal everything in the fall.” I plan to make a big splash in the middle of the year, and then build on it publicly until the end.

  “I know. But if you ask her, I bet Auntie Yaha won’t tell the others. And it would make your mother feel better.”

  I snort. “Because I really care about that.”

  Except, I do, sometimes. I remember the way that we used to be before Papai died. We were never as close as Papai and I, but we didn’t hate each other. I didn’t sometimes imagine what it would be like if she chose to kiri and feel this terrible satisfaction.

  I don’t want her to die, I’m almost sure I don’t.

  “It’s okay to cry,” he says.

  “Gil, you know I hate it when you sound like an agony auntie.”

  He laughs. “Am I wrong?”

  “It’s fine for you to cry. You’re a beautiful boy.”

  “So girls don’t cry? June, I never knew you were so conventional.”

  I’ve cried in front of Gil before, but not since Papai died.

  “You know,” I say, “Mother taught me to paint? She’s not that good, really, but she saw how I loved to smear my fingers in anything, so she bought me one of those child-safe kits and a big canvas. We painted food. Is that strange? I don’t know, but I thought there wasn’t anything more beautiful than the bright red of a shrimp in a vatapá stew. The green of that cilantro. I tried to paint the smells too. I’m sure it just looked like blobs of paint, but she swore she loved them. Papai was sad because he’d thought I might do music like him, but Mamãe …” Could it be that, once, her interest in my art wasn’t about Papai? Only about helping me find myself?

  The moment the sun completes its descent, the lights of Palmares Três switch on, bathing the bay in their gentle white glow.

  Then they blur, and I’m not surprised or ashamed.

  I’m called June because I was born on the first day of June, though that’s not much of an explanation since I’m called June, not Júnia or something. English names aren’t unheard of. There are still some English families in Palmares Três, ones who came here during the great migration after the plague and the bombs and the cold, gray fallout (we just ended up with something like seasons, but the poor North Americans! I know there are still some people who live in New York, but I’d die if I had to wear thermal underwear every day).

  So the real reason is my mamãe. Mother.

  Her grandfather was English, someplace way north. Toronto, I think, or Glasgow. One of those lost cities. He had a daughter from before he even met my great-grandmother, and her name was April. He kept a few pictures of her and somehow they survived. They’re flat, but otherwise bright and clear. April is about my age in them, and she’s wearing weird clothes, a blue robe and a square hat with some sort of fringe. Mother says it’s a graduation photo, and that’s what they would wear centuries ago. April doesn’t look a thing like me: She has straight blonde hair, her skin is milk pale like most North Americans, and her lips are thin, but in her eyes I think I can see a little of my mother. They are wide and stare straight ahead, like a sword that could pierce you. They’re
not eyes that make many friends, and they don’t really care.

  A few years after that photo was taken, my great-grandfather and April became refugees, escaping from the wars and the piles of corpses and the cold, which was worse back then. They hear about this city in what was Brazil, a new pyramid city, built from a Japanese design, called Palmares Três. Not too many people were escaping to Bahia back then, let alone white North Americans. But for some reason, April loved Brazil. That’s the part of the story where Mother gets a little misty-eyed, don’t ask me why. Mother and her immigrant stories. Apparently, April had been studying Portuguese in school, and she was obsessed with classical music, though I guess it wasn’t classical back then. And she convinced her father that they should escape south. The other North Americans were heading to their west coast (just in time for an atomic bomb to hit San Francisco, naturally), and some of them even tried to go overseas to West Africa or East Asia. But April wanted samba, Mother says, she wanted a city of women, because men had done so much to destroy the world. So she and my great-grandfather went to Bahia.

  It took them two years, mostly on foot, and a lot of the time there were wars and natural disasters they couldn’t push their way through. But they came as some of the very first registered immigrants. The city wasn’t even half built yet. But if I go to the public library, I can access their names on the registries. There’s even a photo of the two of them, and April looks so different in that one it frightens me. Her skin is darker — still too pale for Palmares Três, but she doesn’t look quite so strange. Her hair is short, almost not there at all, and so ragged I think she hacked it off with a machete. And her eyes, those stare-straight-ahead eyes, they are brittle as glass. They are a wall keeping back so much pain that I took one look at the photo and turned off the array.

  I guess that’s why Mother doesn’t keep that one in the family album.

  April and her father lived in what would be Palmares Três for about six months. Then boatloads of refugees from the wars in São Paulo and Rio came up the coast, and there was a debate about what to do with them. By this time everyone knew there wasn’t a cure for the Y Plague, and Palmares Três hadn’t had any big outbreaks. My great-grandfather wanted to stay in the city and keep it quarantined. April wanted to help the refugees. They had a huge argument, Mamãe says, and then April left to deliver food and supplies. The Aunties back then had decided to let the refugees stay out on the largest of the islands in the bay. I don’t remember what they called it before, but now, of course, we call it A Quarentena. The quarantine.