“Hey, pick it up,” Steve Stanhope requests. I bend down to retrieve the object. It’s a perfectly round pebble, pure white, like the moon of my boyhood. “You can plant it between the cracks in concrete. It’ll grow wherever.”
“Ste-eve!” Mara sings out across the lawn. “Ste-eve!”
“Gotta run.” The eye winks. “Enjoy, okay? Nice chatting with you. And don’t worry, the hole will be repaired any day now.”
“Does it need water?” I remember to ask only once he’s out of earshot.
* * *
“You can do it!” I say to Lulu. Dusk on Saturday, and we’re standing above the seam between two slabs of concrete in the enclosure behind the building. Sarah refused to come outside.
“A weird random magic pebble seed thingy?” Sarah had said, scrubbing hard at the nonorganic apples in the sink. “From Steve Stanhope? No thanks.”
“It’s a gift,” I countered. “From a neighbor.”
“Isn’t he the one who put those radioactive fish in the canal to eat the other even more radioactive fish?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied.
“Well don’t let Lulu touch it,” she said.
Now, as we stand at the back of the building, I drop the seed into Lulu’s palm.
“It’s cold!” she gasps.
“Looks like the moon, right?” I say. “I mean, that’s what the moon used to look like.”
“Okay,” she says.
Okay.
“So,” I say. “Plant it.”
“Where?” She looks around the concrete enclosure. “Is there some dirt?”
“Well actually,” I explain, “this is a special kind of seed. It doesn’t need even the teensiest bit of dirt.”
“Okay,” she says again. Sometimes I worry about Lulu. She doesn’t seem like a child at all. She never uses words like “teensiest.”
“So all you have to do is just plant it right here between these pieces of concrete. See?” I stroke the seam with the tip of my sneaker. I’ve never seen anything green in our backyard, not even weeds poking up between the cracks.
“So, I should plant it?” she says. “Like, put it here?”
Carefully, she places the seed on the seam.
“Well,” I say, trying to pull my mood up by my own bootstraps, “is that where you want your plant to grow? You have to think these things through.”
“Well,” Lulu says, “I guess someone might step on it when they were taking their trash out. So maybe we should — put it somewhere else?”
I get the distinct feeling that she’s humoring me. Lulu is so good at love. I’m the oldest in our household, followed by Sarah and then Lulu. But in terms of souls, Lulu’s the oldest and I’m the youngest.
“Plant it somewhere else,” I correct her.
“Yeah,” she says.
“You decide.” I pluck the seed off the ground and place it in her palm again.
She walks around the concrete enclosure, cupping the seed, examining all the seams. It takes her about forty-five seconds. We’re talking six feet by ten feet, max. A siren wails by on the street and — absentmindedly, accurately, the way I used to hum along when a familiar song came on the radio — Lulu imitates its howl under her breath.
Then she stops and plants the seed between two slabs. By “plants” I mean she shoves the pebble as far as it can be shoved into the crack.
On the other side of the wall, the Stanhopes’ generator hums maddeningly. I wonder if we reap any benefit from living so near it.
“Fun, huh?” I say as she stands up. I’m expecting her to be polite and accommodating when she glances at me, enthusiastic for my sake.
But there’s an actual glow in her eyes, the delight moving slow and stately across her face.
She says, “I should water it, right?”
Bingo.
* * *
“No,” Sarah whispers. I’m holding her, spooning her from behind on the bed. Tomorrow will be Monday. “It’s not right. I just think — I just think kids now. I mean, our kids. The kids of people like us. They face — they face a lot of — they don’t have — the world — the schools — a lot of disappointment, you know? On a daily basis, right? Like, I heard of a boy who got a ticket for drawing a chalk dragon on the sidewalk. Her school doesn’t own a single microscope, okay? So I just don’t think—”
“It’s too late,” I whisper back. “She planted the seed. She watered the seed.”
“It’s not a seed,” Sarah hisses.
“Be that as it may,” I say serenely.
“‘Be that as it may’!” Sarah whisper-yells. “Are you stupid? Seriously, sometimes I seriously think you are stupid.”
“She can hear us maybe, you know,” I say. Because if Lulu is awake, which hopefully she isn’t, but if she is, she can hear us even over WaveMaker. That’s how thin the walls are.
* * *
On Tuesday evening, the temperature is forty-five degrees higher when I leave my office building than when I entered it in the morning.
“Feels like end times, huh?” a janitor says, laughing as I pass him on my way out to the street.
“Sure thing,” I say to be nice, but then my words stick with me all the way down into the subway. Sure thing sure thing sure thing sure thing.
“Where’s Lulu?” I ask Sarah the second I step through the door. It had been a long bad day. I’d spent nine hours feeling like my computer was an eye disapproving of my every action.
“Out back,” Sarah replies, scrubbing rutabaga in the sink. I can feel her blaming me.
I throw my bag down and run out the door.
There she is, staring at the crack in the concrete. She looks up at me and the day falls away from my shoulders.
“Hey kiddo,” I say.
“It disappeared!” she announces like it’s good news.
So the seed is gone. So a rabid squirrel squirreled it away, or the super finally got around to sweeping up.
“I can’t see it anymore!” Lulu says. “It must’ve sunk down to put in its roots!”
I’ve always thought Lulu is more like Sarah in temperament. Darker, tending toward pessimism. But now it occurs to me (with horror) that maybe Lulu is more like me. Relentlessly optimistic.
“Well well well,” I say, far more accustomed to Lulu’s solemnity than to her glee. “How about that. Let’s go in and have some dinner, okay?”
“Aren’t you glad, Daddy?” she says.
“Oh,” I say, feeling sad. “I am so glad.”
“Thank you for the seed.” Lulu gazes down at the crack in the concrete. “I gave it a few more drops of water. Is that okay?”
She’s wearing her blue school uniform. The humidity frizzes her hair and shines her skin. Sometimes she looks so wonderful I have to shut my eyes.
I say, “Let’s go see what Mom came up with for dinner.”
Inside, Sarah has set the table with cloth napkins. She’s lit a candle. Sarah is the kind of person who can create something out of nothing, a skill that’s coming in more and more handy. Cleverly, she sautés rutabaga leaves with garlic. She roasts the flesh with oil and Italian seasoning and calls it rutabaga gnocchi, and sure, the chunks of it are not entirely unlike gnocchi.
I have this trick where I flick my fingers against the side of my taut cheek to make a sound like a drop of water falling into a body of water. It’s a refreshing sound, and Lulu loves it. Given the hotness of the night, I make the drop-of-water sound a bunch of times as we sit down to dinner.
Lulu claps. Sarah rolls her eyes.
“Ugh, stop it,” she says. “That sound depresses me.”