Zenn Diagram Read online

  “Ethan went a little peepee,” Eli reports.

  I look to my mom for confirmation, but she shakes her head. “That’s what he says. I didn’t hear a drop, and the water is as clear as a country creek.”

  “I did!” Ethan insists. He squeezes his eyes shut in concentration and sure enough, I hear the very faint trickle of something from beneath him.

  My mom hops out of the tub pretty nimbly for an almost forty-year-old. “Ethan! I heard it that time! Nice work!” She lifts Ethan off the seat, taking away Eli’s support and nearly making him fall back into the bowl. I grab his arm just in time.

  Eli glances up at the excitement but then returns to his book. This one might still be wearing diapers when he’s my age.

  One boy’s urination is enough to satisfy my mom at this point. I get the feeling that she’s been in the bathroom for a good part of the day. She lifts Eli off the toilet, too, tugs up his Pull-Up and tells them both to wash their hands.

  “Why so late today?” she asks me. “Don’t you have student council on Friday mornings?” Keeping track of my schedule and four preschoolers is just too much for her most days. I’m impressed she has any clue when I have student council.

  “Tutoring,” I answer, rolling up Eli’s sleeves so they don’t get soaked under the faucet.

  “Oh, right!” She gives a towel to Ethan, who has started drying his hands on his shirt. “It’s barely October. Is a month enough time for kids to get that far behind?”

  “Some kids,” I answer, with a bit of unintended condescension in my voice, and I immediately feel guilty. They may suck at math, but they have other strengths. Like, most of them have more than one close friend. Most of them can touch a jacket without nearly passing out.

  I herd the kids out of the bathroom and head to the kitchen to help my mom make dinner. She’s not much of a cook, but she manages to throw together a decent meat loaf. My dad comes home while I’m mashing potatoes. He kisses my mom and gives my shoulder a squeeze. I lean in to his touch, greedily accepting his affection. I’ll take whatever touch I can get; I just can’t give much of my own. Well, except to the kids, who are still sweet and innocent enough that their fractals are bright squiggles of pastel. I can touch the kids, but I hug my parents tentatively, my hands balled into fists away from their bodies. I know if I touch my mom it will only take a moment to feel all those years of loneliness, all that sadness, all the frustration that she so carefully camouflages with good Christian optimism. I don’t doubt that she is a pretty happy person now, but my visions dip deep into the well of past feelings. The kinds of feelings that neva eva really go away.

  Chapter 4

  The blue cup wobbles precariously. Ethan reaches to steady it but in his panic he tips the whole thing over, sending milk across the table for the second time in five minutes. I grab the damp rag that is always my dining companion. We only fill up each cup about an inch, which means more frequent filling but lower-volume spillage. But even an inch of milk in the cup becomes a puddle on the table. My mom is determined to get the kids drinking out of regular cups. The sheer number of sippy cups we use multiplied by their difficulty to clean has led her to this frustrating mission, which results in at least two spills per meal, three meals a day. That’s 186 spills a month, or 2,190 spills per year, at a minimum. I joke that we should make a tablecloth out of ShamWows that would just absorb spills, or maybe a table with a drain in the middle, so we could go on eating without interruption. Maybe we could even recycle the spilled drinks, saving money along with our patience. But until we invent one of these alternatives, I mop up the milk and suppress my sighs.

  “Sorry,” Ethan apologizes, his apology even cuter and more pitiful because his r’s come out like w’s.

  “S’okay,” I say. “Just … pay attention to your octopus arms, okay, bud?”

  He giggles and tucks his elbows in obediently. For now.

  My dad refills Ethan’s cup while my mom corrals the peas that have rolled off Libby’s plate. Dinner at the Walker house. Good times.

  My dad is telling us about a Bible study he led this morning focused on the story of Martha and Mary. I know the story. I know all the stories. I mean, I am the daughter of a pastor after all. But this is one (of many) that vexes me a little. Jesus goes to visit sisters Mary and Martha, and while Martha is running around cooking and cleaning and trying to impress Jesus with her Martha (coincidence?) Stewart entertaining prowess, Mary sits at Jesus’s feet, fawning all over him. Finally, Martha loses it and is like, “Jesus! Will you tell Mary to get her ass in the kitchen and help me for a minute?!” But Jesus goes, “Chill out, Martha. You are stressing about everything, but only one thing is needed and Mary’s got that figured out.”

  So of course it’s a sort of carpe diem/be-in-the-moment/ don’t-miss-the-forest-for-the-trees message. And I get it. Sorta. But I think about poor Martha running around and trying to be responsible while her lazy sister sits on her butt, flirting with a boy. It’s one of those stories that doesn’t sit right with me. Like the story of the prodigal son: The responsible son stays home and works for his dad, while the other goes off and wastes his inheritance on hookers and booze. But when the slacker son slinks home, ashamed, does the dad give him a talking-to? Tell him he messed up? Um, no. The dad throws him a party. Kills the fatted calf for him. The responsible son is pissed off and is like, “Um, hello? Do you even give me a sickly little goat when I want to party with my friends? But you kill the fatted calf for my loser brother?” And the dad says, “You’re a good kid. You’ve always been a good kid. Everything I have is yours. But your brother, who I thought I lost, is back. We’ve got to party!” I mean, I get it. It’s a message of forgiveness, of joy in finding someone who was gone to you, of grace. But I don’t necessarily like what it says to lazy, greedy, irresponsible people. Do what you want and somehow it’s all good in the end? Yeah, that’s not how the world works. Or that’s not how it should work.

  I guess I have issues with a lot of biblical messages. I keep these issues mostly to myself. I keep a lot of things mostly to myself.

  Anyway, my dad is telling my mom about the Bible study and how so-and-so said this and so-and-so said that and, in the brief respite between milk spills, my mind wanders back to Zenn and the vision. That’s the thing about fractals; they are pretty hard to forget.

  That jacket was a doozy. Some things, like grocery carts or doorknobs or even car keys, just aren’t held long enough by one person to develop any kind of attachment. They’re sort of neutral. Things that are held only while performing certain tasks, like calculators, seem to soak up only algos associated with that task. Tools or kitchen utensils or sports equipment, stuff like that. I hold my dad’s softball bat and all I get is his frustration that his home-run days are over. But the other stuff? Cell phones and jewelry and jackets, things that never leave a person’s side: those are the things I avoid. Those things are witnesses to an excruciating array of human trauma. I avoid them like I avoid mushrooms and olives.

  The algos I get from people’s calculators are generally calm, neat, orderly. Tidy formulas in organized rows, like a set of instructions to follow. But fractals are chaotic, overwhelming, heavy. Sometimes scary and intricate, like competing whirlpools trying to swallow chunks of jagged metal.

  I remember the first time I tried to do something about a fractal. In fifth grade my friend Lauren and I were on the school playground. We’d been best friends since the beginning of the year, and that day we were dangling upside down from the monkey bars, swinging by our knees until we could build up enough momentum to fly off the bar and land on our feet.

  We counted together as we prepared for launch:

  “One …”

  “Two …” Lots of giggling and holding our shirts down so they wouldn’t show our sad little training bras.

  “THREE!”

  Off we flew, but instead of landing gracefully like the gymnasts we thought we were, we landed in a pile on top of each other, giggling at our
own clumsiness. I stood up and brushed the dirt off my skinny jeans, and then reached out to help her up.

  When she put her hand in mine, fear and uncertainty flowed from her body in waves of orange and neon blue like an electric current. I didn’t understand what it was trying to tell me, but it was as real and as solid as the metal bar I reached for to steady myself.

  I was used to getting visions from adults. I hadn’t named them at that point, but I knew what they were, and I had learned to avoid touching grown-ups because of them. But I had never gotten one from a kid, and certainly never from one of my friends. At first I thought it was from our fall — that maybe she was embarrassed or hurt and that was what I was sensing.

  “Are you okay?” I asked her.

  She laughed and stood up. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  There must have been something in my voice, something different and more serious than usual, because she looked at me and her face grew stony, hard to read.

  “Yeah.” But her eyes didn’t quite meet mine.

  I reached out and touched her arm and the fractal struck again, just as strong as the first time. It made me sad in a way I couldn’t explain, gave me a sense of unease in the pit of my stomach. She looked at me funny.

  “What’re you doing?” She pulled her arm away, wary.

  “It’s just …” I searched for a way to describe it, but couldn’t. I had never told her about my visions. I had never told anyone other than my parents and various doctors. How could I tell her that I knew something was wrong even though she hadn’t told me a thing?

  “Stop being a weirdo. What, are you gay or something?”

  We had just learned what the word gay meant, and by the tone of her voice I didn’t think she meant it as a compliment.

  I wanted to touch her arm again because the puzzle was starting to come together. Something about her parents. About their house and maybe about money. But I knew not to touch her again. I knew I was being weird. She was already backing away from me, but not because she really thought I was gay. I could see in her eyes that it was because she sensed that I already knew whatever it was she wasn’t telling me.

  I just didn’t know what to do about it. A couple of days later our teacher asked me to help the kid who sat next to Lauren with his math. Even back then, I was always helping people with math. Lauren and I switched desks for the hour, which wasn’t unusual, but this time I found when I placed my hands on the desktop, when I lifted the hinged lid, the fractal was there, too.

  I told my mom about it and she gave me a sad look. She was familiar enough with my visions to know they were real, no matter how much she wished they weren’t.

  She’d been dealing with them since I was a toddler, when I cried whenever someone held my hand or when I touched pretty much anything besides other children or my toys. My mom thought I had some kind of arthritis or skin sensitivity or rare pediatric joint issues. She had me wear gloves, spent hours massaging my fingers (which only made it worse), took me to specialists who, after skin tests and X-rays and MRIs, never could find anything wrong.

  When I was older I tried to explain it to her, but I must have sounded like a possessed devil child because she immediately started having the whole church pray for me. When that didn’t seem to work, she took me to a psychiatrist. No luck there either. So by the time I was six or seven, I learned to just limit my contact with grown-ups and keep my mouth shut. But my mom knew it was still there: her daughter’s psychic weirdness. She saw how I avoided handshakes, how I’d pretend not to notice when someone dropped something so I didn’t have to pick it up. She knew.

  She knew that whatever I had sensed from Lauren was real. And she already knew what the problem was.

  “Lauren’s parents are getting divorced, honey,” she told me gently. “I’m sure Lauren is upset about that.”

  After that I tried to be an even better friend to Lauren, but a couple of weeks later she wasn’t in school for a few days in a row, and then one day her desk was cleaned out and rumor had it that she had moved away.

  I wonder what happened to her sometimes. I’m not sure what I could have done to help, but that’s the problem with fractals: you have these secrets, this information that you are not intended to have, and no matter what you do with it, it’s not enough.

  So instead I’ve learned to just avoid them because it’s like opening a can of worms. Once you know something about someone, you can’t unknow it again.

  If you Google mathematical fractal you’ll get images that look like lightning, or haunted snowflakes, or solar flares. Scary and beautiful, creepy and intriguing. That’s how they feel, too. The line between fascinating and frightening is a thin one. Lightning is cool to look at, but no one wants to get struck.

  We’ve exhausted specialists and therapists and at this point I think the only hope I have of getting cured is to find the cure myself. My plan is to study neuroscience and see if I can’t figure it out. Take matters into my own vision-inducing hands. I’m good at solving puzzles — maybe it’s not such a far-fetched idea. Maybe the person with the problem is the only one motivated enough to solve the problem. It’s really my only option because frankly I’m not sure I can live with this for the rest of my life.

  “Eva.”

  I hear my name and glance up from the dinner table. My dad is looking at me expectantly.

  “Huh?” I spaced out in the midst of the Mary and Martha story. Whoops.

  “Could you pass the potatoes? Please?”

  “Oh! Sure. Sorry.” I reach for the bowl, carefully avoiding the minefield of small cups.

  “Everything okay, Ev?”

  I wave away his concern and take a bite of meat loaf. “Fine,” I tell him. I smile and chew, and my nonchalance seems to appease him. I don’t tell him about Zenn or the haunting weight of his fractal.

  What’s to tell, really? High school is rough on people and it’s not like Zenn is unusual. Sure, that fractal I got from his jacket was a little darker than most, but what if it hit me hard because I’m out of practice with anything but algos? I’ve been particularly careful lately.

  I decide to test it out.

  My dad’s cell phone sits on the table next to him, always on hand for pastoral emergencies. I debate picking it up, but I’ve learned my lesson with phones. His would be especially awful, with all the prayer requests he gets daily. Dying parents, sick kids, cheating husbands, drug-addicted friends — you name it.

  So instead I take his glasses, which he only wears for reading. Without him noticing, I slip them off the table and hold them in my hands on my lap. The vision comes gradually, not in an instant like the one from Zenn’s coat. And it’s definitely a fractal, but a simple one, mostly a deep teal swirled with gray blues, a pattern like a chain. There is some darkness, a sense of heavy responsibility, but overall it feels manageable, sadly hopeful, cautiously positive, like all the books he reads while wearing them. I sneak the glasses back onto the table. Compared to that, Zenn’s jacket fractal seemed like something out of a Stephen King novel.

  I decide to try my dad’s phone anyway. I press my fingers on it, as if I’m just sliding it across the table, and a darker fractal comes more quickly. It’s blackish green and clumpy, like seaweed. I see flashes of navy and crimson swirled together like blood and oil. It feels like divorce, death, heavy sadness, cries for help.

  But still it is nothing like Zenn’s.

  I remove my hand again and realize my mom is watching. She is nodding at something my dad just said, but she is studying me intently. She looks like she is about to say something when Essie bumps over her pink cup and I grab my handy milk-soaked rag.

  After dinner I help with baths before doing the rest of my homework. Bath time is at least a two-person job at our house, and my dad is off the hook tonight because he has to be back at church for a meeting. So my mom and I rock-paper-scissors for who does washing and who does diapering and PJs. I usually don’t mind either job, but toni
ght, after all the spilled milk, I just want the driest job.

  My mom fills the tub and strips the girls down while I put on a VeggieTales video for Ethan and Eli. I watch with them for a bit and Larry is singing one of his silly songs about a hairbrush when Essie waddles back into the room wrapped in a towel, her pink cheeks shining.

  “C’mere, Esther Faith.” I wrap my arms around her and jokingly wrestle her to the ground. She giggles, but quietly. She’s the hardest one to rile up. I wouldn’t dare do any roughhousing with Ethan this close to bedtime or I’d never get him to sleep. I pat Essie’s silky skin dry and put on her nighttime diaper while she lies perfectly still, batting my dangling hair like a cat might play with a piece of yarn. We count together backward from twenty while I rub pink baby lotion on her skin, enjoying its warmth and softness. I don’t mind the mini-fractals she gives me, like little rays of orange sunlight. Her fractals are simple. Pleasant. Still untainted by the brutal world. I tuck her pudgy arms into her fleece pajamas and then sit her up so I can comb out her wispy hair.

  Libby is next, and she barrels into the room, loud and naked. “Boysboysboysboys!” she yells. “Your turn!”

  Ethan groans. “But I watching VeggieTales!”

  “Mommy!” Libby yells. “Mommy! Efan is not listening to me!”

  Essie sits patiently on the floor while I drag Ethan to the bathroom. Libby stops fussing as soon as he is gone. It takes about an hour, but eventually all the kids are bathed and dressed, tiny pearl teeth brushed, and in bed. My mom seems on the verge of saying something once the boys’ bedroom door clicks shut behind us, but I quickly excuse myself to finish my homework. If she thinks I’m having a rough time with the fractals, she’ll offer to take me somewhere else, to some psychiatrist or specialist she read about in a magazine at the doctor’s office. But I’m tired of dead ends and false hope. I’ll figure this out myself. So I give her a light smile and whatever she had been about to say is overruled by my false display and her overwhelming exhaustion. She collapses on the couch and I finish my math quickly so I can cross it off my list. I wouldn’t be able to savor it tonight, anyway.