Just Under the Clouds Page 10

  The roof.

  “The roof,” I say out loud. I slip back to my feet and look to Adare, her smile almost as big as mine is becoming.

  The inverse.

  If I can’t climb up, I’ll just have to get to the roof and climb down.

  “I’ve got to get to the roof,” I tell Adare, who nods fast, like she cares more about this than I thought, like maybe we’re in this together.

  “Yeah,” she says.

  The red warehouse looks kind of like a barn or a big old shed where people keep things they don’t use. I circle the edges. The grass rides up and tickles my knees.

  “We need to find a door,” I say. But there’s only lumber leaning up against the shingles.

  I can see the junkyard and the excavators with their bending yellow arms, elbows pointing up. There’s nobody around, but it feels like somebody was just here, everything left in midair, like a frozen television screen.

  There’s a huge, loud rumbling sound as I turn another corner and there’s a door propped open a little. I know we need to get in, no matter what, because I need to be in that tree. I need to understand the magic of what’s inside.

  I knock, but the door is thick and strange and my knuckles make barely any sound. So I take a deep breath and push the door open wide, into the cold, heavy brick room.

  A gigantic pink structure touches the ceiling, which is so high, I get dizzy looking up into the rafters.

  There are people in big rubber boots and silver space suits, their clear helmets snapped shut over their faces. They hold long wood poles with barrels attached to them and I don’t know whether to stay or go. There are shouts and echoes and it’s warm, and as I look up at the giant pink stone, I watch men in their boots and gloves dangling from a pair of ladders like acrobats.

  The rumbling sound gets inside my chest and I feel the heat before I see it. The barrels burn orange and spill fire, like they’re pouring angry sunlight. Sparks fly and flicker and fall to the ground and I let out a yelp without meaning to, thinking I should run, but something in me, some kind of knowing and wishing, stands firm.

  There’s a shout. “Hey!”

  Then “Hold up!”

  And they turn their giant rods. The fire settles back upright into its burning cauldron. The low rumbling quiets.

  A woman in boots and gloves pulls the helmet from her face. Her hair is in spooling ropes, piled on top of her head. “What’s this?”

  Then I realize she’s pointing at us, we’re the this. I stand, frozen in the doorway.

  “Get out or come on in!” she yells.

  So I do what I know best. I grab Adare’s hand and run as fast as I can.

  As I do, I feel the blanketed sky break apart, the clouds wringing out rain. The raindrops are at my cheeks, running like tears to the dirt and the roots and all the things just trying their best to inch up.

  I hear Adare let out an excited shriek. She’s all laughter and rain as the cat slinks toward the fallen tree for shelter. I see Sabina’s note stacks, all safe and dry.

  Adare spreads her arms out, spinning around an imaginary maypole. She dances a Brooklyn rain dance next to the red warehouse. I stare at her and wonder what gets inside her like that, what makes her feel like, wherever she is, she belongs.

  “The tree’s our secret, right?” I ask Adare after we rush to the subway steps and squeak through the turnstile, shaking our wet coats and hair over the platform, dripping a puddle on the train floor. “And the fire.”

  I help her put her shoes back on, and she looks at me with a wide grin, her hair in a frizz. Then she nods, like she’s just decided. “Okay.”

  “When people find something rare in nature, they don’t tell anybody the exact spot,” I explain, more to myself than anyone. “That’s so no one’ll go and ruin it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And the cat,” I remind her. “That’s our secret, too.”

  She nods. “I love him.”

  “Whatever you say, Adare.”

  She seems satisfied with that, so I feel satisfied, too. Maybe Adare and I don’t need our crows if we have this secret to share.

  When we leave the subway, the rain has stopped and the sky is a mushy, soft gray, like it’s getting ready to turn dark. I scan trees. There are ginkgoes, Norway maples, and Callery pears.

  Then I push through the revolving doors and smile at the doorman. My shoes are slippery. The rubber squawks the way Sabina’s boots do and we slip into the elevator, press the button, and rise up, passing floors.

  When we twist the key to Willa’s apartment, Adare starts giggling and rips her shoes off, throwing her sopping wet socks in the air, tossing her coat in a heap on the floor. I try to straighten her pink high-tops in the line of shoes Willa keeps in the entrance. I place her jacket on the hook just as I see her clothes in a hopscotch pattern on the hall floor, polka-dot leggings, a hoodie, and a T-shirt. Adare’s running in her underwear through the apartment, laughing.

  Mom peeks her head around the wall. “What’s going on here?”

  Adare wraps her arms around her bare chest and leans in with a whisper. “Rain.”

  “I see that.” Then she looks to me for an explanation.

  “Just climbing again,” I tell her. “We got caught in the rain.”

  “You know I don’t like you climbing in the rain. You could slip.”

  She leans against the white wall, holding a steaming cup of tea in her hands. Adare stands in her underwear, her hair leaping every which way.

  “How about a nice bath?” Mom asks.

  Adare crinkles her forehead. She’s too used to standing in curtainless shower stalls where the hot water only works half the time.

  “Let’s try it,” she says, and Adare shrugs, then slides down on her naked tummy across the hardwood floor, looking for Sookie.

  While Mom runs the bath, I sit on the shining white tiles with my Tree Book. My scribbles are silly symbols and a sloppy script of words. There are lines of crooked branches and bent flowers, a daffodil with a miniature bell in the center, because that’s how it looks. All of it means something, but only to me. And Daddy’s numbers and calculations tell the story of a garden that doesn’t grow anymore.

  Willa’s tub has four silver feet that look like a cat’s paws. It seems like something from an antique shop, but it gleams as if it’s had a makeover.

  When the tub is full, Mom slaps her knees and stands up. Then she holds out a piece of paper, folded in a neat little square. I recognize it right away. The note from Mrs. Belz.

  “I found it doing laundry,” she says. “When were you going to tell me?”

  I shake my head. “I’m sorry.”

  “If you need help, you come to me, Cora.”

  “When? When’s the right time to talk about math when you’ve got too many other things to worry about?”

  “This is as important as anything. More important, even.”

  “Me being smart, you mean? Me getting it right?”

  “No, Cora. You understanding. You staying on track. It’s important, given our circumstances.” Then she sighs. “I dropped out of school,” she tells me. “Willa hated me for it. I hate me for it. Don’t make that mistake.”

  I nod. On track. Not off it. Not like the kind of kid who cuts her first class of remedial math.

  “When do you start the class?” she asks.

  I hesitate. I don’t mention today. I can’t. I say, “The day after tomorrow. We’ve got an assembly.”

  She looks at me, squinting, like she’s trying to figure me out. “I want to hear all about it.” Then she pulls out the other piece of paper, my crumpled test of fingernail moons. “Your drawings are beautiful, Cora.”

  I snatch it from her, feeling embarrassed by the answerless test.

  She points to my book. “Y
ou haven’t run out of pages yet?”

  I shake my head. “Not yet.” But I look warily at what’s left. Even the margins of old pages are filling up with my scribbles.

  “He was very meticulous, your father.”

  I start writing what I know so far. Tree of heaven. No buds. Mid-March.

  “He wanted to understand all the living things he studied. The land, for him, was a science. It’s not like that for us, is it?”

  I pause, my pencil caught in a loop of script.

  “We go by how we feel, in here.” I watch her place her hand on her heart. “And Willa’s place, it feels…”

  “Right.” I finish her sentence at the same time that she says, “Wrong.”

  She calls for Adare. Then we sit with the quiet.

  “I love Willa. But she’s…” Mom searches for words. “Judgy. She judges, not just for herself. For others, too.”

  I think of her giving me money for the MetroCard and having Jade visit.

  “She thinks she knows best. She thinks I don’t know what I’m doing with my life.”

  “Do you?” I ask.

  “It’s not easy, Cora. Doing this on my own. But things are steady at the store. I’m on track to a promotion. To manager. Working with displays. We’re going to find a safe place, somewhere, that’s ours. Not Willa’s.”

  “But it’s easy here,” I say, trying to convince her anyway.

  “Easy isn’t what we’re made of,” she says.

  I wonder why what we’re made of has to be so hard. I think there’s got to be a part of me that fits in easy right here.

  “I don’t remember his voice,” I say.

  Mom is quiet.

  “And his face is a blur.” I hold out my Tree Book. “But he left us what he knew and I’ve mapped out everywhere we’ve ever been.” I flip through the pages. “I know everything that grows here.” I swallow hard. I say what I have to say. “We need time,” I tell her. “In one place. We need seasons. That’s the only way to make it work. We need to stay.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “I am.”

  Mom reaches out for my hand. “What do we have today?”

  I hold open my palm. My blurry knot.

  “What is it?”

  I look at the misshapen blob and think of all the wrong of today. Cutting class, getting off track, spouting words I never meant to say.

  Adare bounds in and leans over the tub, smacking her hands against the pool of water.

  “I don’t know,” I say, even though I know it’s just the mess inside of me.

  “It’s something,” Mom tells me. “Keep going.”

  The next day, I make my way back to the canal with Adare.

  It’s drizzling this misting kind of spray, and it leaves a sheen on our cheeks and frizzes up my hair. Adare does her usual stop-and-go toward the canal, like a Coney Island bumper car, and I sigh at every stop.

  The mist reminds me of the way I used to spray the leaves in my greenhouse and I tell Adare, “I’ve got to get in the warehouse. I think it’s the only way up.”

  “Okay.” Then her bright, shining eyes darken. We both look toward the houseboats and I wonder why I didn’t see Sabina at lunch, why she barely even waved when I passed her in the hall on my way to art.

  Adare and I circle the warehouse together and approach the door. This time, when I push it open, no one is standing around in a space suit. It’s quiet and the barrels aren’t lit. They hang in the gray of the room, with its dim light and cold stone floor. There are tables with wood and metal and paper thrown across them. The giant pink sculpture still races to the ceiling, but now it’s in the shape of a skinny, narrow, misshapen heart.

  A woman sits, her hair in big, wound dreadlocks. She’s the woman who yelled out yesterday. She sits hunched over the messy table in the corner.

  I leave the doorway and walk toward her, Adare still holding tight to my hand. I don’t know whether to let my voice boom out in the echoing room or what. I’m saved the trouble when Adare calls out her famous “Hi.”

  The woman squints through the room. “Can I help you?”

  Yes, I think, and then I let myself say it. “Yes. I need to get to the roof.”

  She looks us over. My tangled hair and a sunflower backpack strapped to my shoulders. Adare with her big mirror eyes. The woman folds her arms. “What for?”

  “I’ve got to get in a tree,” I tell her.

  I look up to where Adare keeps staring. At the ceiling. At the top of the giant metal heart. The right side of the heart is angled and edged, crooked and strange, but the left side is smoothed into a perfect arch.

  “Sounds important.” She unfolds her arms. Then she follows my gaze to the heart and points. “What do you think of it?”

  “It’s tall.” I tell her what I see. “The two sides don’t match.”

  “That’s right. They don’t.”

  “Shouldn’t they?”

  “More often they don’t.”

  I can’t help but think of Daddy, how even the biggest of hearts can fail you in the worst way. “You made it like this on purpose?” I ask.

  She nods. “I had help. This place is a foundry. For shaping metal. You saw everyone here, shaping it into what I need it to be.”

  “So that’s what everyone was doing in space suits?”

  She laughs. “Space suits…I guess so.”

  “Is it art?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  I tilt my head at the towering heart, with its two sides that don’t match. Mom says art is something made. Something that makes you think or feel a little spark of wonder inside. “I think it is.” Then I ask, “Is it your heart?”

  She tilts her head and smiles. “You could say that, yes. A little crooked. A little confused. But big. Or at least trying to be. You know?” She asks it like she really cares to hear the answer, so I think about the unfinished drawing in my palm, my trying as best I can, and I tell her, “Yup. I understand. My mom was an artist. She painted murals around here. Liana Quinn. Have you heard of her?”

  She shakes her head. “No.”

  “Oh.”

  She takes her hands to her hips. “So what is this about needing to get in a tree?”

  “It was my dad’s tree, once. The tree of heaven. He studied it right up until he died.”

  She looks like she’s thinking. Then I remember she’s an artist, so I try a new way of explaining. I reach into my bag and dig for my Tree Book. I hold it out. “I’m a climber,” I explain, and I say it the way Mom did that night in Willa’s kitchen, like I’m proud.

  “Tough break, being a climber along the Gowanus Canal. Not much grows here. And a lot of trees got lost in the storm a few years back.”

  “But this one’s still here.”

  “Then it must be strong.” She stands up. She wears a lot of scarves wrapped around her shoulders and hanging in fringe from her neck. Her heavy boots knock the floor.

  “Well, I’m afraid I can’t help. I don’t own the place. I’m renting it until we have our exhibition. That’s all.”

  “Oh.” I feel my negotiation hitting a dead end.

  She reaches her hand out to me for a shake. “I’m Anju.”

  But it’s Adare who takes her hand and, instead of shaking it, runs her fingers across the sparkling gold rings and funky round stones.

  “This is Adare,” I say for her.

  Anju doesn’t snatch her hand away. She takes her other hand and closes it around Adare’s instead. “And you are?” she asks me.

  “Cora.”

  She smiles. “El corazón.”

  This is one of the Spanish words I know, so I say it out loud. “Heart.”

  “And the name of my piece.”

  I look u
p into the rafters, to her heart, the top of her piece. There are pipes running all along the ceiling and sprinkler knobs in case of fire. I see a ladder attached to the wall that snakes up high and I see it lead to the vaulted roof.

  I’m about to open my mouth and point out the ladder. But maybe it’s better as a secret. Maybe Anju doesn’t want a climber in her rented space. Maybe I’ll have to get there when she’s gone.

  “Wait a minute—did you say Liana?” she asks.

  I nod. “Yeah, why?”

  “There was a mural artist who painted all along the walls of community gardens. Liana Reyes.”

  My eyes grow wide. Mom’s name before she was married. “That’s my mom.”

  “So you’re an artist, like her?”

  I nod and blush. “I guess.”

  “Cool. Well, I hope you get in that tree,” she tells me. “I really do.”

  I smile, thinking that now I’ve found the ladder, I will.

  “There’s roof access. For sure.”

  Adare nods, which gets me even more excited, thinking I’m getting closer to where I’m supposed to be.

  Then she rips her hand from mine and sends it soaring, following a line of flapping black as it disappears. “Crows,” she says quietly.

  “Yours?” I wonder out loud.

  But her gaze has already dropped. She runs outside the lines of the canal like some kind of taking-off crayon.

  “Adare, you come back here!” I’ve got no choice but to follow as she takes the narrow path and crosses the Ninth Street Bridge, curling around to the other side of the canal where Sabina’s houseboat sits in the oozing water.

  She stands in front of the boat, lingers for a second. I call out from behind, “Adare, stop right there! We’re not invited.”

  But she runs from the dock onto the boat, slips through the little door, and slams it.

  I walk to the door and knock, then realize, with Adare already in there, that doesn’t make any sense, so I let myself in, feeling my cheeks go red and hot. I dip my head and everyone stares up at the two of us.

  Sabina and Jacob sit on the floor with their homework. Mrs. Griffin sits in a hard-backed chair with some kind of knitting.