Part One

It’s cold outside and Aunt D’s door is bolted. Dion lies down above her top step. His limbs draw, almost instinctively, into his chest.

She grabs her father’s pant leg and tugs gently. “I’m sorry we’re late,” he says. “I know what it means to you. It’s just that the tracks didn’t clear in time.” A door swings open behind them and the empty hallway fills with bodies. She leans against his leg. “Some things,” he says, turning toward the noise, “we can’t control.” The girl wants to tell her father that it’s okay, but the noise of children is too much. She saves her words, shuts her eyes, and waits.

Dion’s bare feet press against the marbled floor near the open door. A boy, backpack swinging, thrusts through the opening towards the girl. Dion lunges and plants himself in front of her. The girl releases from her father. Dion flexes and feels a great hole pass through him. He looks back over his shoulder. The backpack swings wide and scrapes the girl’s face. Her eyelids open to dust grey bulbs and tears spill into her mouth. The father kneels down, and pulling the girl into his chest, holds her there.

“Up!”

Dion blinks, and in the moment he sees her eyes and hand, he’s clenching.

She slaps him.

“Don’t say it.”

“Wasn’t going to.”

“What the fuck wrong with you?”

He braces himself again and speaks.

“Nothing.”

She slaps him.

Half as hard as my mom used to, Dion thinks.

Aunt D starts again.

“Well hell, something wrong with you. You been mumbling to yourself like yo brain gone.”

She limps up the steps, hitching on her right knee, and coughs hard twice at the top. Emphysema, Dion thinks, as he rises from the cement. Now standing upright, he shoves each hand into a jacket pocket. Aunt D turns and looks back at him all shocked, and he pretends to look shocked too. A stream of cool air slides across his face and he thinks about saying something more.

“What?” Aunt D leans toward him. “You crazy?” She snaps at his right eye. “Looking at me like that.”

She slaps the top of his head.

“Like you gonna say something.”

Her voice resonates.

Dion feels overwhelmed and can only mouth the words. He thinks of the girl in the dream, drowned by noise, and a pang of resentment rises in his gut. He thinks about his distance from her.

Aunt D pulls a set of keys from her back pocket and holds them in front of his face. “These what you waiting for?” They dangle and clang and he stares past them, unmoving.

In a second the key disappears in the lock and he’s watching the door open and close. He stands there awhile, touching his ear. Probably not even bruised.

***

Dion wakes to the dry creak of the top bunk. He pushes the sheet from his chest and rotates his head on a thin pillow. He lifts a wristwatch from a stack of books and its face falls into a sliver of light. 6:00. Half an hour until breakfast.

Leaning on his right side, Dion lifts Bronx Noir from the stack. He opens the cover with his left hand and the binding guides him to “Hothouse.” He presses his fingers against the book and looking at the title, realizes he’s read it. A new need for the story rises within him, circulates, and he begins.

At the turn of the fourth page the girl on the ATV finds the guy, a fugitive stranded in a blizzard. It’s the dead of winter in the New York Botanical Gardens and they find refuge in the conservatory. Inside, everything is silent, still – another world. This is the part he wants. He whispers the words, containing them within a rhythm that, he feels, gives them life: “Amazed, gulping moist vanilla air, he stood amid long rows of orchids, gardenias, who knew what else. He was no gardener. Back home you didn’t need to be. Back home these plants didn’t need you. Here, they had to have pots, drips, lights, towering glass walls to save them from vindictive cold, from early dark, from wind that would turn their liquid hearts to solid, choking crystals. Here, soft generosity had to be guarded. He started to walk, farther in. He wanted to walk to the tropical core of the place. He wanted to walk home. Each step was warmer, lovelier, more dreamlike. But when he got to the giant central room…” Dion looks away from the page, wanting the rest to disappear. He doesn’t want the guy and the girl to find the hole in the conservatory roof and watch helplessly as the plants freeze. He doesn’t want the guy to die and he doesn’t want the girl to leave. He wants them to just sit inside, ingesting the humid scents. That’s it. Not even talking much or having sex or anything like that. None of that matters. Dion closes the book and imagines the plants flourishing.

A whisper tugs him from thought. “Hey, you awake down there?”

Dion sits up, making sure he is. “Hey you, down there.” Dion looks down at the book. “You awake?” He squeezes it with both hands, compressing the pages. “Why don’t ya say something?” Dion thinks about the guy in the story, stranded in a blizzard. About how, at the moment before death, the girl’s voice pulls him back into consciousness – back into feeling.

“I’m awake, I guess,” Dion mumbles.

“You not sure?”

“I mean, yeah, I’m awake.” Dion pulls the sheet back over his chest.

“Good,” she says. “So I got here last night and you and those two in that bunk over there were sleeping and I’m pretty good at keeping quiet, ya know, minding my business.” She peers over the edge at Dion below. Suddenly she’s smiling and reaching down. She offers her hand.

“Kelly. And you?”

He mutters his name and her hand meets his. The touch and release of flesh feels strange.

“Looks like you’ve been here awhile,” she says, noticing the stack of books.

“Yeah, eight years. Aunt D says eight years.”

“Wait. You mean Ms. Darius?” Kelly asks.

“Yeah, Aunt D.” Dion thinks about how to explain. “But we don’t really talk to her much. Only when the married people come once in awhile.”

“What does she have you say?”

“I don’t know, just that we’re good. That we’re smart and that she helps us with school. And that she shows us how to behave.”

“Oh,” she sighs, picturing Aunt D putting on a show for the visitors.

“It was a white woman last time and she had me read one of my books. That was about a year ago.”

Kelly blinks. She leaves the image behind.

“Okay, but what’d ya mean she says eight years? Don’t you remember the day you came here? Or maybe who brought you? Or why?”

“No, I was seven.”

“Well maybe you wanna figure that out.”

“Yeah.” Dion pauses. “Maybe.”

He waits for Kelly to speak. For the first time, she’s slow to.

“Well I’m only here a few days. I’m gone once I find my dad.”

She jumps from the top bunk, landing next to his bed.

Dion sits up straight. “Well, why do you want to find your dad? Isn’t he the reason you were living with your mom?”

Kelly hesitates for a moment and then redirects the question. “Hey, so...wanna be my boyfriend for a bit?”

The thought of it rises, but she drowns the words. “Oh, come on, it was just a joke.” Dion sees her smile and feels its heat, as if it could sear skin. “What, no laugh?”

Dion finds the words and speaks. “I don’t really want to be anyone’s anything, and besides…”

“Get movin’ up there!” Aunt D’s voice fills the room, cutting him off. “At the table. Five minutes. No messin about today.”

Her words echo and settle into the wood.

Kelly starts toward the door.

“Hey, wait a second.”

She doesn’t. He follows.

“Maybe you should give her a minute.”

She keeps moving. When Dion reaches the doorway she's already halfway down the rotting stairwell. She stops on the landing and looks back up.

“I need to ask Ms. Darius about my dad.”

He eases down the first two steps, creaks on the third, and then starts moving faster.

***