The Summer Prince (39 page)

But we have so little time, too little to waste on something as useless as anger.

“Run,” I say, leaning into him, letting his body fill all the space between us. He smells like wood, like grass, like his mamãe’s doll forgotten on the rubble. Like the earth, burning.

“I’m going to die anyway,” he says. His tongue flecks my ear. I shudder. “It’s the mods. From the very first one they gave me, in the ceremony after I won. No matter what, June, they always make sure we’ll die in a year.”

My mind feels clear as a pond. I understand him perfectly. “So why come here?”

“For this. For you.”

He lifts my chin and I’m forced to see. Our tree has turned into something too beautiful to mark something so ugly. Zanita has made a carnival, a Death Head’s skeleton jumbled with feathers and fire. It’s the battle that nearly killed Tomas, death and life dancing in the ruins
of a city. And Enki? He’s made an altar, the kind in the main city shrine. A crude, rough-hewn figure lies beneath a blade.

“You knew they were coming?”

“I heard her. The city. She helps pilot their aircraft.”

“We could have gotten away.”

“I’m still dying.”

“But why should they have you!”

My voice is loud and broken. Auntie Maria asks again for me to step aside and Enki doesn’t move.

“It’s time to go home, June,” he says. “We need to go home.”

For some reason, I look back up at the tree. The middle carving is cruder than the other two. I’m not any good, after all. But it’s my papai who looks at me from the dead tree. My dead papai who smiles and plays music and
lives
.

He lost the music, and maybe that’s why he could never find my art. I’ve had to find it for myself.

“Summer King,” says Auntie Maria, “we should leave now.”

Enki kisses my ear. He turns my head until I taste just the corner of his mouth. I am crystal clear, I am a pond, I am a light.

I am nothing at all.

He lets me go. “There’s a song,” he says. He takes a step back.

“There’s always a song,” I say.

Auntie Maria hovers right behind him. Two security officers take my arms, but they don’t move.

“
Forgive me if I dare to confess
,” he sings, badly.
“I will always love you.”

“Are you sure that’s right?” I say, though of course it is.

He smiles.
“Oh, my God, how sad, the uncertainty of love.”

“We’re leaving, Enki,” Auntie Maria says. Enki doesn’t seem to hear her.

“Wait for me,” he says. “I’ll be dead, but wait for me.”

He turns. He walks away. Unthinking, I call out. I try to follow him and the security guards pull me back. One of them lifts my sleeve, the other pricks my arm.

Enki walks away with an Auntie who will kill him in two weeks.

His dreadlocks in the light from their cruisers. The shoes he hates walking through the ruins of his mamãe’s house. The clothes that are dirty from the garden. The hands that just touched my own.

Does he look back? I sink to the ground. My head lolls against my shoulder.

Does he look back?

I burn where he last touched me.

I stare at the space where he has been until everything fades.

My papai died in July, which I think he meant as a kindness.

He was unfailingly
kind
in those last months, which always made it worse. Mother and I tried to reason with him at first. We sent him to priests and mães de santo and doctors. We tried to be understanding, but in the end, the only thing we needed to understand was that he was done with life.

“I’ve lost the music,” he said, and so I tried to sing it for him. But we both knew I had never understood music the way he did, and he would merely smile and turn away. He gave away his collection to one of his colleagues at the university. I bought more and tried to play it for him. He gave away his clothes and his books. He registered with medical services to donate his useful parts before cremation. He attended the required therapy sessions, wrote the required explanations, waited out the required holding period. And throughout it all, he never wavered, never once seemed to question his decision.

The kiri board approved his request. Mother had ten days to register a formal family protest — it would have given us a reprieve of another six months in which to reason with Papai before the kiri board could review his case again.

She refused. “João wants to do this. I just have to respect his decision. I can’t drag him through another six months.”

But I knew what she meant:
She
couldn’t bear another six months of watching her husband of forty years patiently, gently,
kindly
longing to die.

“You’re killing him!” I remember screaming. I think I yelled worse. That’s when it started, of course. Not after, when she introduced me to Auntie Yaha, or at their wedding. Of course not. I stopped loving my mamãe when she decided to let my papai go.

I didn’t understand much about letting go, back then. I suppose I didn’t know very much about love.

I tried to file the protest myself. The registrar handed me a tissue and waited for me to stop sobbing before she explained that you had to turn thirty before you could petition to delay the kiri of a relative. I said that he was
my father
. She said that it was a shame, but you just couldn’t trust wakas to know when it was a grande’s time to go.

Gil never said much back then, but he would listen. In a world of grandes who talked, his silence kept me sane. Gil has always been great at understanding. And not just me — my mamãe and my papai too. He understood the whole sorry mess and could see no better way out of it than the rest of us.

Papai’s request passed the formal review process. He scheduled a date: July 3, because at least then I wouldn’t always associate my papai’s death with my name.

I didn’t want to associate my papai’s death with anything, I said, but Mamãe just stroked my hair and told me to be strong.

He gave me his copies of
The Zahir
and
True Palmarina
, two paper books that he brought with him during his long merchant ship journey around the world. I’d loved to touch them when I was little but I hadn’t thought of them for years.

I refused to take them. When he insisted, I tossed them into the bay.

I cried more that day than a week later, when he actually died. He seemed so blank, so sad and uncomprehending. And now, with over three years of his absence behind me, I could punch that girl I was; I
would kill her if I could. What right did she have to do that? To squander the last moments with her father? To destroy the piece of himself that he had meant to leave behind?

Papai wore a white shift and no shoes. In the vestibule, he seemed distracted, but happier than I had seen him in months.

He kissed mamãe and whispered something in her ear. She nodded and her eyes stayed dry.

To me, he offered an embrace. I refused him.

“I hope you have a happy life, June,” he said. “I believe you’ll be great.”

That was the last time we saw him alive. They delivered the urn a few hours later.

“He passed peacefully,” the intake nurse told us.

We scattered his ashes in the bay, into a frigid wind on a boat where we could watch the sun set behind the city.

Neither of us cried.

They’ve removed my tree. I laugh when I first realize it, staring at my naked body in the single half mirror. They did a good job, at least. The faint pale marks where the lights used to glow will fade eventually. Then I’ll look just like everyone else again. My laughter hurts.

It seems petty — as though they imagine that by removing my signature body art, they could remove the spirit of transformation that has gripped this city.

I don’t remember much of how I got here. Just snatches from a long overland trip in a cruiser: a rotting ship, just off a sandbar. A pile of wood, bleached like whalebones. Rivulets of brackish water cutting channels to the ocean.

I try to remember the ocean, because I don’t know if I will ever see it again.

I don’t know if I will ever see anything but this small room. It’s much like the congenial prison where they kept Lucia: bare floors, a
single hard bed, a desk without even the most basic fono array, and a bathroom. Unlike Lucia, I don’t merit a window. They have given me nothing to write with, nothing to draw with, nothing to communicate with. If not for the meals periodically deposited by security bots, I’d have no sense of the passage of time. A few of my own clothes are in the closet, so at least Mamãe must know what has happened. I wonder if they will let me speak with her. I ask the bots questions when they enter: What day is it? What time is it? Where is Enki? Where is Gil? Where’s my mamãe? The bots say nothing, but I know they record my questions. Maybe if I beg enough the Aunties will relent, but it seems a frail hope.

Of all my questions, the first is the most important:
What day is it?
I remember learning that carnival used to be in February, at the end of summer — winter in the northern hemisphere. We kept it that way down here in the south for centuries, but the first Palmarinas decided to change it. I suppose if you’re sacrificing a king to the gods in a rite of spring, it doesn’t make any sense to do it at the end of summer.

They caught us at the start of September. Two weeks away from the sacrifice and affirmation of the Queen’s position. Two weeks away from his death. Enki would ask why it matters, but I can’t bear the thought that he might die without my even knowing.

That he might already be dead.

A week or so in sedation, making that steady, painfully slow land journey back to the city. I wonder if Auntie Maria herself planned that particularly cruel bit of torture. And then? Two days in solitude here, praying to any orixás that will listen to spare Enki’s life, or at least let me see him one last time.

That leaves two or three days until the ceremony. He’d be in seclusion by now, preparing himself for that final communion, for his most sacred duty. He wanted this. I never understood before, but I do now. Enki might not respect the Aunties, but for some reason he wants to play their game to the end. Our detour to Salvador was just his final chance to say good-bye to his mamãe.

Maybe even to say good-bye to me?

I left his doll on the ground in his mother’s house. The one thing he had been so desperate to find, and I dropped it like a worthless toy, like it wasn’t the last piece of him I would ever have. I cry thinking of his happiness when he pulled it from the ground. I cry so I don’t have to scream.

Eight meals and three sleeps into my confinement, I get my first visitor.

Oreste carries my food tray herself. I let her put it on the desk, though courtesy demands I take it from her. If this petty rudeness annoys her, she doesn’t let it show.

“How have you been, June?” she asks.

“What day is it?”

“September fourteenth.”

Two more days. My teeth start to chatter. “Can’t I at least get a fono?”

Oreste’s regretful smile holds just a hint of triumph. “We don’t think that would be very wise, June, given the circumstances.”

“What the hell could I do with just a fono?”

Oreste gives a delicate, regal shrug. “You’ve proven yourself very adaptable with technology. And very resistant to the natural sacrifice of this particular summer king. Consider it a compliment.”

I stare up at her. She has refused to sit in my presence and I don’t trust myself to stand. “You won’t even let me watch.”

Now the triumph is unmistakable. “You caused us quite a bit of difficulty, June. You actually kidnapped the summer king. The government of the next five years was being called into question. We nearly had a revolution on our hands. Did you really think I’d reward that by letting you witness the sacred ceremony?”

“Is it really the fourteenth?” My voice is barely a whisper. I cough.

“Of course,” says the Queen. “When the boy dies, you’ll know.”

“Tell me, who’s his second? Who did he pick?”

Oreste snorts. “Gil, of course. The whole city can’t get enough of their epic love story. I could hardly refuse.”