MORTAL COILS (2 page)

“No
fair using foreign words.”

Fiona
had a talent for languages, while he did not. They had a pact, though: no
foreign words from her and no made-up words from him in their games of
vocabulary insult. Eliot had a particular talent for finding colorful but
nonsensical terms that had no place in any dictionary.

“It’s
not foreign,” she said, beaming with satisfaction.

He
believed her. They never lied in vocabulary insult.

Eliot
tried to puzzle it out. Tristan . . . like the knight of legend? Maybe a
castle? Fiona was forever reading travel journals. That had to be it.

“Yes,”
he said, adopting his best fake ironic air. “Behind its walls I might be safe
from seeing your face.”

Fiona
blinked. “A good guess, but absolutely wrong. Tristan da Cunha is an island in
the South Atlantic, thirteen hundred miles from the nearest inhabited land.
Population two hundred eighty. I believe their official currency is the
potato.”

Eliot
deflated. “Great, you win,” he muttered. “No big deal. I let you. Happy early
birthday.”

“You’ve
never let anyone win anything.” She gave a short laugh. “Happy birthday to you,
too.”

“Come
on.” Eliot brushed past her.

She
caught up to him and squeezed by. Thousands more volumes crowded the hallway on
either side, from hardwood floors to water-stained plaster ceiling.

They
emerged in the dining room and squinted as their eyes adjusted to the light. A
picture window showed the brick building across the street and a faint band of
sky bisected by high-tension power wires, only partially obscured by the
overflowing bookcases on all sides.

Great-Grandma
Cecilia sat at the dining table writing letters to her many cousins. Her
paper-thin skin was a web of wrinkles. She wore a brown dress that buttoned all
the way up her throat and looked as if she could have stepped out of a tin
daguerreotype.

Cecilia
beckoned to them and hugged Fiona, then Eliot, adding a dry kiss for good
measure.

He
returned her trembling embrace, but oh so gingerly, because he was afraid he’d
break her. A hundred and four years old was nothing to fool with.

Eliot
loved his great-grandmother. She always had time to listen to him, no matter
what she was doing. She never gave him advice or orders. She was just there for
him.

“Good
morning, my darlings,” she whispered. Her voice was the rustle of autumn
leaves.

“Morning
Cee,” Eliot and Fiona said together.

Eliot
shot his sister a look. She was doing it again: that synchronicity thing. Just
to get to him.

Cecilia
patted his hand. “Yesterday’s homework.” She nodded to the papers on the edge
of the table.

Fiona
was a little closer and grabbed them before Eliot. She frowned, peeling off the
top sheets, and passed them to him. “Yours,” she murmured, then focused on the
rest of the pages.

Eliot
took them, annoyed that she had looked at his grade before he could.

A
large C+ had been scratched at the top of last week’s essay on the Thomas
Jefferson Memorial. Next to it was Fine thesis. Flawed execution. Writing
closer to aboriginal than English.

Eliot
winced. He had tried so hard. He had all the ideas in his head, but when he put
them onto paper, everything got tangled.

He
glanced at Fiona; her olive complexion had paled. He stepped closer and spotted
the large C– on her page.

“My
ideas were ‘amateurish,’” she whispered.

“It’s
okay,” Eliot said. “We’ll help each other rewrite them tonight.”

Fiona
nodded. She took bad grades harder than Eliot, as if she had something to prove
to Grandmother. Eliot had given up trying to live up to her expectations.
Nothing was ever good enough. Sometimes he just wished that she’d leave them
alone.

“Alone
or together,” said Grandmother, “I expect those rewritten tonight along with
your new assignment.”

Eliot
jumped and turned.

Grandmother
stood behind them in the hallway, arms folded over her chest, one hand holding
two crisply typed pages.

“Good
morning, Grandmother,” Eliot said.

It
was Grandmother always. It was never Audrey or Gram, or any other pet name like
they used with Cecilia. Not that it was forbidden, but Grandmother was the only
thing they ever thought to call her. It was the only title that carried the
authority her presence demanded.

Grandmother’s
thin body stood with perfect posture and towered over them at an even six feet.
Her silver hair was shorn with military precision, and her olive complexion had
not a single wrinkle, even though she was sixty-two years old. She wore a plaid
flannel shirt buttoned all the way to the top, jeans, and steel-toed boots. Her
expression, as usual, was one of ironic inscrutability.

She
handed them the pages: tonight’s homework, which consisted of seven geometric
proofs and a new essay on Isaac Newton’s personal life.

Eliot
flexed his hand and wondered how short he could make this new essay and still
get a passing grade. A passing grade according to Grandmother was an A–. She
always told them that “excellence is the least that is expected of you” and
made them rewrite subpar papers until they were good enough.

“They’ve
had breakfast?” Grandmother asked Cecilia.

“At
eight thirty.” Cecilia gathered her letters and envelopes into a neat stack.
“Oatmeal, juice, one hard-boiled egg.”

Boiling
water was the upper limit of Cecilia’s cooking ability. Eliot always offered to
help, but she never let him.

Grandmother
plucked up their turned-in homework, and her gray eyes scanned the first lines
noncommittally. “They should go,” she said. “Being late for work will not do.”

“Couldn’t
. . .” Cecilia’s weathered hand curled around her throat. “I mean, tomorrow are
their birthdays. Must they do homework the night before—”

Grandmother
shot Cecilia a look that guillotined her words midsentence.

Cecilia
looked down at her letters. “No, of course not,” she whispered. “Silly of me.”

Not
even Cecilia could get Grandmother to bend a rule. Eliot loved her for trying,
though.

Grandmother
turned to Eliot and Fiona and tapped her wristwatch. “Ticktock,” she said, and
leaned closer.

Fiona
gave her a polite kiss on her cheek. Eliot did, too, but it was just a
formality, part of the morning’s scheduled activities.

Grandmother
gave him the slightest hug.

Eliot
knew she loved him—at least, that’s what Cecilia always said. He wished her “love”
would be something other than rules and restrictions, though. Just once he
wished she’d cancel homework and take them all out for a movie. Wasn’t that
“love,” too?

“Lunch
is on the table by the door,” Cecilia told them. “Oh, I didn’t get to the store
yesterday. . . .”

Eliot
and Fiona glanced at one another, understanding.

Fiona
bolted for the front door first and Eliot followed—but too late. She grabbed
the larger paper bag off the table, the one Cecilia had slipped the last apple
into, and ran out the door.

Eliot
reluctantly grabbed the remaining bag, knowing it only contained a dry
tuna-fish sandwich on rye.

“Have
a good day, my darlings,” Cecilia called after them, smiled, and waved.

Grandmother
wordlessly turned away.

“Thanks,
Cee,” Eliot whispered.

He
ran after Fiona, down the hall, past the elevator, and to the stairs. She was
always trying to outrace him—everything was a competition with Fiona.

Eliot
wasn’t about to let her win without a fight. By the time he hit the upper
landing, though, Fiona was half a floor ahead of him, her longer legs carrying
her farther, faster.

He
chased her down the three flights, round and round, Eliot now only a few feet
behind—until they burst through the steel security door onto the street.

It
was a sunny day in Del Sombra, and they rested a moment in the narrowing shadow
of the brick façade of their apartment building.

On
Midway Avenue peach trees sat in planters. Their branches swayed in the warm
breeze and dropped not-quite-ripe fruit on the road to be spattered by the
tourists racing to Sonoma County.

“I
won,” Fiona said, breathing heavily. “Twice. In one day.” She shook her
paper-bag lunch. “Extra apple, too. You need to be faster, Bradypus.”

Bradypus
was the genus name for the three-toed sloth, one of the slowest mammals in the
world.

Eliot’s
mood darkened, but he didn’t let her bait him into another round of vocabulary
insult; instead he just shot her a glare.

He
unclenched his paper-bag lunch, still in a tight grip from their sprint. A
metallic clink came from inside. Eliot unrolled and then peered into the bag.
At the bottom were two quarters. That was Cee, trying to make things even
between him and his sister.

Eliot
plucked them out and held them up to the sunlight. They gleamed like liquid
mercury.

Fiona
grabbed for them—but this time he was quicker.

“Ha!”
he said, snapping them securely into his fist.

He’d
use them to buy carrot juice from the health-food store on his break. Better
than the flat soda or tap water they got at Ringo’s. He dropped them back into
the bag.

Fiona
shrugged as if those quarters didn’t mean anything to her, and she briskly
started to walk down the sidewalk.

Eliot
knew her; it mattered.

He
caught up to her. “You think anything’s going to happen tomorrow?”

“Like
what?” Fiona asked. “New rules?”

His
stride faltered. It was a distinct possibility. Grandmother’s list of rules
grew longer every year. The latest entry was just five weeks ago.

   
RULE 106: No dating—single, double, dutch, chaperoned or not, or otherwise.

As
if that were going to happen in his lifetime. Maybe it was for Fiona. The guys
at work sometimes talked to her.

“I
just thought . . . ,” Eliot said, running to catch up to his sister. “I don’t
know. Like school—maybe we’ll go to a real school. With other kids. Wouldn’t
that be better than Grandmother’s assignments every night?”

Fiona
said nothing, her silence voicing her opinion.

Other
kids were sometimes a problem for him and his sister. While Eliot knew the
capital of Angola (Luanda), the number of genes in the earthworm,
Caenorhabditis elegans (about nineteen thousand), ask him to make small talk
with a girl and his IQ dropped thirty points.

“Yeah,”
he said, “maybe not such a great idea.”

But
something new had to happen. Almost fifteen years old. You couldn’t live your
entire life just doing the same thing every day: Ringo’s, homework, reading,
chores, sleeping.

Was
this what it was going to be like until he was eighteen? Would Grandmother keep
them home until twenty-one? Forty? Until they were as old as Cee?