Fighting for the Future, page 21
“I know,” Aileen says. She carefully sips her steaming soup. It’s a little salty but otherwise good, tortilla strips crisp and corn kernels plentiful among the beans. “The car’s electric, so I should be okay. I won’t be in town for too long.” With the volunteers unable to recover a body, Aileen can’t imagine there will be much to do besides collecting Haru’s few personal effects from the temple. Perhaps she can light some incense at the altars. They would have appreciated that.
“Mm,” the cashier says. Up close, he looks just a little older than Aileen, with an insomniac’s dark bags under his eyes and uneven stubble dotting his chin. “Dani’s got an EV charger at her place. She lives in the yellow house down La Cienega, the one with the goats outside. Yellow walls, solar panels all over the roof—you can’t miss it. You need anything, Dani’s probably got it. Tell her Marcos sent you.”
Oddly touched, Aileen puts her spoon down. “Thank you,” she says. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
Brightness wakes Aileen up the next morning, sun shining through the car windows to hit directly in her face. New York gets hot in the summer as well, but this flavor of California heat is far more nostalgic, a dry heat evoking memories of childhood afternoons spent eating popsicles and practicing cannonballs off the diving board at the community center.
The municipal pool has long since been filled with concrete, the area bought by a real estate developer hoping to build summer homes for rich B-list celebrities looking for an escape from LA. Perhaps the venture might have even succeeded, but that was before the wildfires had ruined whatever property value La Paz once had.
At the time of the fires, the Harmonious Resonance Temple had been one of the most affected buildings. In the light of the new day, however, the temple Aileen approaches stands bright and whole. Not as large or grand as it once was, perhaps, but still intact.
Aileen takes a few minutes to walk through the place, admiring the fruit trees and the tidy lines of tomatoes growing in their trellises. Though there are places where the limits of Haru’s efforts are evident, moss growing over the faces of the guardian lions and sections of the roof missing tiles, there are paper cups of sake in front of the altars and dried wildflower garlands around the necks of the bodhisattvas. While the bulk of the temple is Buddhist, a small contingent of the Taoist gods command the east corner of the temple, figures Aileen vaguely recognizes from her old Mandarin workbooks. Outside, the statues of Shinto deities sit serenely on stone platforms beneath the shade of the orange trees, fallen leaves covering the offering plates. Half hidden between the squash, a carved white fox winks up at Aileen: a messenger of Inari, Haru’s favorite kami for the many shapes and genders they took. Aileen makes sure to rub the fox’s nose, less for luck than because it is the kind of thing Haru would have done.
Finally, she reaches the small room at the back of the temple where Haru had lived.
As promised, someone else has already taken care of the cleaning. A small desk and futon remain for the future occupants, but otherwise the room is bare—no posters or pride flags on the wall, no paperbacks or scarves cluttering the ground, nothing to indicate the brilliant, infuriating friend who at sixteen tried to talk Aileen into matching stick-and-poke tattoos. Haru’s belongings have been packed into cardboard boxes, hastily but not without care: clothes and shoes in one box, candles and half-finished ceramics and in another, Cicero and The Lord of the Rings and Mead journals in yet another. An entire box is full of college textbooks, some missing their covers or held together by duct tact—Haru had never excelled at school, but they were smart, a consummate dabbler whose bedroom in high school had been a constant mess of watercolors and knitting projects. Despite being the more outwardly successful student, Aileen had always envied Haru’s enthusiasm, the sheer joyful curiosity they brought to every project and cause.
I will not cry, Aileen tells herself as she rifles through crystals and tins of tea and handmade skirts, hems slightly uneven and fraying from use. Their last conversation had been years ago, Haru calling on a borrowed phone to congratulate Aileen on finishing her PhD. She is here to collect the last belongings of a childhood friend, nothing more. There is no point in nostalgia, not when there are only scraps and memories of her hometown left, and not even all good memories at that.
In the years after their father’s death from cirrhosis, Haru claimed they forgave him, but Aileen remembers the panic on Haru’s face when they showed up at Aileen’s house, seventeen and newly homeless with nothing but the clothes on their back. Haru’s dad had been a decent man once—there are photos that prove it, birthday parties and zoo visits where Haru laughs atop the shoulders of a younger, blonder man. But his wife’s death had damaged something in him, broken the mechanism that would have responded with compassion instead of disgust to his child daring to be their true self. ESL speakers who stumbled over ordinary pronouns, Aileen’s parents had not understood the intricacies separating nonbinary from tomboy. But they, at least, had tried.
From the garden, the faint sound of chimes carries. Taking a deep breath, Aileen forces herself to unclench her hands. Haru’s father has long since been dead, and now that Haru is gone as well, Aileen will not taint this place with her own bitterness.
Driving down La Cienega, it doesn’t take long for Aileen to spot the building she’s looking for. Even without the bright yellow walls which shine like a beacon from a mile away, Aileen would have no trouble recognizing her old high school gym. Seeing it now with solar panels covering the roof and vines climbing up the sunny yellow walls, Aileen can hardly recognize it as the same grim building of her youth.
A shaggy white dog comes barking out of the house as Aileen parks, followed by a brown-skinned woman in overalls. Though her face is lined and white streaks her hair, there’s a wiry strength to her frame, a clear confidence in the way she holds the shotgun in her arms.
“Luna, aquí,” the woman says, snapping her fingers. The dog circles back to her, gaze not leaving Aileen. “Can I help you with something?”
“Hello.” Aileen walks forward slowly, careful to convey that she isn’t a threat. “You’re Dani, right? I’m Aileen. I don’t know if they mentioned it, but I was—I used to be friends with Haru. I got a letter a few weeks ago, telling me to come to the temple and pick up their belongings.”
Comprehension dawns on Dani’s face, and she tucks the shotgun under one arm. “The letter would have been Jean’s work—she’s the one who took care of packing Haru’s things after the news came back. So, Aileen. You here to chat, or is there something you need?”
Aileen rubs the back of her neck, embarrassed at being caught out so easily. “Well, I was at the temple, and I noticed there were some places that could use patching up—solar panels that needed replacing and trellises that are a little wobbly, that kind of thing. It felt wrong to leave without trying to fix them, and the man at the EZ Mart said that I should talk to you if I needed anything, so here I am.”
Dani sighs. “Marcos, of course. How about this,” she says as Luna sniffs Aileen’s sneakers. “You tell me what needs fixing, and I’ll see what I have on hand. Sound fair?”
“Very fair.”
Dani nods. She whistles for Luna, who bounds back to her. Aileen follows, dry grass crunching under her shoes.
“I do have some cash on me,” Aileen says as they stop in front of a storage shed, “but if it’s not enough, though, I can send you a check or an online deposit. If you could just get me an address or a bank account number, I can do that once I’m back in LA.”
“That’s sweet of you to offer,” Dani says as she fishes for keys in her pocket, “but we don’t do money around here, not for stuff like that. If you can get the place fixed up so someone else can live there, then that’s payment enough for me.”
It is exactly the kind of thing Haru would have said. Hearing it from a stranger’s mouth leaves Aileen momentarily unable to do anything but stare as Dani steps into the shed.
“Well?” Dani asks. “You gonna come in and help?”
They talk as they work, locating solar panels and roof tiles from among piles of tangled power tools and rusted toasters. Aileen tells Dani about New York, the elevated gangways the city is building for rainy season and her own work on new flood dikes. It’s important work, and Aileen is proud of what she’s done. Still, there are days when, sorting through complaints about clogged storm drains and flooded subways in Brooklyn and The Bronx, Aileen wonders if there isn’t some other, better way for her to help, one that benefits bodegas and lower-income neighborhoods just as much as it does corporations and high-rises.
In return, Dani talks about working in Silicon Valley, the heady allure of start-up money that had kept her in the city until gentrification and fire season’s orange skies finally led her to leave the Bay Area. Driving up from the border one summer, she’d stumbled on La Paz, a will-o’-wisp of a ghost town on the verge of blowing out. Still, something about the place called to her. Maybe it was the incongruity of the landscape, scorch marks where gas stations had once stood next to new growth and rabbit burrows, empty parking lots and empty buildings full of wildflowers and native grasses. Or perhaps it was the people—the way the few residents, teen runaways and anarcho-environmentalists and long-time locals too stubborn to move, pooled their resources together to deliver groceries to elderly neighbors and clear away dead brush in the summer. Either way, Dani found herself staying far longer than she thought she would.
And they talk about Haru: Haru, who never pledged their allegiance to any god or religion, but who lit incense and swept altars every morning, a reverence built from quiet gratitude for the place that offered them a home as a teenager. Haru, who could roll pastry dough and braid beautiful soft challah like a professional but who couldn’t flip pancakes to save their life. Haru, who needle-felted lopsided sheep from dog fur and blessed water bottles before feeding them to plastic-hungry bacteria, the prayers a mix of Shinto and Buddhist practices with a dash of New Age love for pageantry.
“Interesting kid,” Dani says, shaking her head. They’re sitting on the patio beside her house, glasses of cold sweet tea and lemon cookies between them. Beneath their feet, Luna stretches out between them, occasionally raising her great head to watch the goats wandering out of their pen. “Some weird ideas about planetary consciousness, and they were way too fond of those bastard raccoons that squat in the old church, but a good kid.”
“Haru always had a soft spot for animals,” Aileen says. “When we were in middle school, they would get in fights with boys who liked burning ants for fun.”
“Sounds like them.” Dani leans back in her chair. “You couldn’t find a lost cause or wandering hitchhiker they wouldn’t try to adopt. I always warned them about that. Walk around with your heart on your sleeve, and one day you’re going to find yourself bleeding out.”
They fall quiet at that. Both thinking, no doubt, of the fires that still raged a few miles south—contained for now, perhaps, but not forever, and not without sacrifice.
Four months after Haru’s father disowned them, wildlife rangers reported the beginnings of a brushfire in south Ventura County. High winds blew the flames south, transforming a small fire into a furious inferno that burned through dozens of towns before it stopped. It was a cruel irony that Haru would survive that conflagration only to die years later helping put out a much smaller fire.
Beneath the table, a tiny black-and-white goat bleats at Dani, tugging at her pants when she doesn’t respond quickly enough.
“All right, all right,” Dani says, leaning down to scoop the kid into her arms. “You’re hungry, I get it. I got you.”
She turns to Aileen. “I have to get this needy baby some milk warmed up, but I’ll send Jean and some of her friends your way to help with the heavy lifting. Two days from now, community dinner’s down on East Street, in the old parking lot where the Wal-Mart used to be. People bring food, Marcos makes tamales, someone always has a guitar or a tambourine. If you’re still here, you should join us.”
Aileen is sifting through band T-shirts, separating the less worn shirts from those too moth-eaten to be donated, when she hears the rattle of an engine coming down the road. At the front of the temple, she finds three passengers spilling out of an ancient pickup truck: a slight Black girl with short purple hair, a tall dark-skinned kid with at least five piercings in each ear, and a stocky white kid wearing the most eye-searingly orange shorts Aileen has had the displeasure of seeing. None of them can be older than twenty-five years old.
“Hey,” the girl says, holding out a hand. “Jean, she/her. You’d be Aileen, right?”
“I would.” Despite her stature, Jean’s grip is startlingly strong. “Ah, my pronouns are she/her as well. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Haroun, he/him,” the boy with the piercings says, waving. “And that’s Alec, they/them or xe/xir.”
“Hey,” Alec protests, toolbelt bouncing as they walk forward. “I can introduce myself.”
“And let you scare the poor lady away?” Haroun asks. “Not a chance. Your job here is to look pretty and lift things, not talk.”
“Sounds kinky.”
In response, Haroun jabs an elbow in Alec’s stomach, which xe isn’t quite fast enough to sidestep. They retaliate by kicking Haroun’s shin, making him hiss in pain before lunging for xir throat.
“Ignore them,” Jean advises. “It’s like handling toddlers—sometimes you just have to let them scream for a while. You told Dani some of the solar panels aren’t working, right?”
“I did,” Aileen says. “She gave me some replacements, if one of you could help me install them. There are also some places on the roof where the tiles have fallen off, and the door of the garden shed doesn’t open. I don’t think there’s anything important inside, but if you’re planning to keep the place open for whoever else might need it…”
“Then they’re going to need a garden.” Jean nods. “Okay. I’ve got some bobby pins on me so I can see about the door, and if push comes to shove, we can try kicking it down—which would mean getting a new one sometime, but we can do that after you’re gone. As for the solar, Haroun can help with the installation, but it might be best if he peeks at the wiring to make sure nothing internal has gone wrong first.”
“And I’m here for all your spare lifting, hauling, and general moving around,” Alec says, pausing xir attempt to suplex Haroun to give them a small salute. “Any floorboards you need hammering, I’m your pal.”
“Is there anything I should do?” Aileen asks as the small crew makes their way to the back of the temple. “Anything I can help lift or carry places, maybe?”
Jean shrugs. “If we need help with anything, we’ll let you know. Otherwise, you can help supervise if you want.”
“Are you sure? I just feel bad standing around while you do all the work—”
“Seriously,” Jean interrupts, emphatic, “it’s no problem. It’s all work we would have done eventually. We take care of our own here, and Haru—well.” Something passes across Jean’s face, a shade of emotion threatening to break her composure. “Haru would have done the same for us.”
A few hours later, sweaty and tired, Aileen and Jean sit on the back porch, Dani’s fans blowing behind them as they survey their work. The new solar panels gleam atop the roof, as do the new mounted tiles—despite their bickering, Haroun and Alec had done good work. In the garden, a few sparrows peck at the entrance of the now open shed. Jean and Aileen had to pull the door off its hinges in the end, and it leans against one wall of the shed now, serving as a shade and playground for the nearby squirrels.
“So,” Jean says as she unwraps a granola bar. Haroun and Alec are out getting tacos, but Aileen is still a little embarrassed to have nothing else to offer. “You knew Haru way back, didn’t you?”
Aileen sips her water. “I did. We met here, actually. My parents weren’t religious, but the Temple used to be a hub for a lot of Asians nearby. On weekends, people from two or three towns would drive down for martial art practice and language classes. Haru and me used to come here after school just to run around and annoy the nuns.” Given how many meditation sessions they ruined, it was a minor miracle Sister Lam ever offered Haru a job, even if the temple had been in desperate need of repair after the fires. “How did you and Haru meet?”
“Same way anyone meets Haru here. You arrive in town, and you set up in some abandoned building where you’re sure the police or the homicidal ex you’re running from will never find you, someplace you can catch your breath before moving onto the next town. Two days later, this stranger comes around with a duffel bag full of muffins and jam, asking if you need blankets or help setting up the electricity. Next thing you know, you’re helping Marcos chop onions for community dinner and playing lab assistant while Dani tries to synthesize estrogen from horse piss.”
“And the homicidal ex and the police?”
“Technically not my homicidal ex,” Jean corrects. “If you’re looking for proper drama, you’ll have to go to Haroun or Alec, but those are their stories, not mine. All I’ve got is a foster mom who liked the idea of helping ‘disadvantaged urban youth’ more than, you know, the actual reality of disadvantaged urban youth. Haru was the one who found me first here, sixteen and pissed at the world. They offered me scones, then asked if I wanted to introduce me to the rest of the town. I said no because I was sixteen and convinced I didn’t need anyone’s help, but, well. They could be persuasive when they wanted to be.”
There’s something in the way Jean talks about Haru, a certain cadence or softness of tone, that reminds Aileen of the way she too had once felt about Haru. The feeling never had the time to grow into anything—Haru had come out, and in the chaos of being disowned, there’d had been no time to think of anything resembling romance. The spark had faded, another what-if blown out in the path of growing up.
