The Summer Prince (12 page)

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.

She died out there. No one is really sure how. I didn’t understand this for a long time, because she was treating people sick with the plague, what else could have happened? But once, Mamãe implied that she might have been murdered by some deranged refugee.

“Rape,” she said, “it’s a terrible thing. Terrible. We are so lucky here, June.” But she was drunk so I just put her to bed while nodding my head reassuringly.

April died and my great-grandfather never got over it. Once, after Papai died, I tried to imagine how I’d feel if my last conversation with him had been an argument.

Let’s just say I understand why he’s never smiling in the family album. Eventually he met his second wife, a true Brasileira from Salvador, and they had a daughter. He didn’t name her April — or June or August, for that matter. He gave her a good Bahian name, Folade.
And she had a daughter, who was my mother, Valencia. And when Valencia had her daughter, for some reason she thought about her grandfather, who had died when Valencia was a waka like me. April’s story had always appealed to Mother, I guess it was because of those straight-ahead eyes. The kind of eyes that can abandon someone they love for the sake of plague-ridden refugees wasting away on a rock. Mother planned everything very carefully. She arranged for the daughter she would name April to be conceived in time for a guaranteed April birth. But the doctors said there was something wrong with Mother’s first pregnancy and so she had to try again two months too late. And when I was born, my mother for once decided to work with what I had given her.

And so she called me June.

My mamãe died a few weeks before your papai, I don’t know if you knew that. It wasn’t a kiri, though she was only forty-five. It’s not a secret how she died, but for some reason none of the gossip casters dredged it up from the municipal files, or maybe they did and figured it was too arbitrary, too sad to get views. They like me a lot, the gossip casters. I’m like a meteor before them, but they want me bright and young and don’t like anything that might bring me down.

Before I have to be, anyway.

But my mamãe died in an accident. Ironic, given that she’d left Salvador just so she could feel safe. She would always tell me how she missed Salvador, but wouldn’t go back to the city with its bombs and gang wars and poverty for all the money in Royal Tower.

But then a spider bot malfunctioned on her line to the verde late one night and her pod was caught in the slowly collapsing tube. She suffocated before any rescue crews could get to her. Probably she would have survived if she lived in one of the upper tiers, but it took the crews half an hour to bother with the verde.