She looked at that Spider-Man movie poster over his bed—Miles Morales leaping from top of the Morningstarr Tower, shooting webs in both directions. “As long as you keep your grades up,” she said, “there’s nothing wrong with it.”
Jaime didn’t answer; he didn’t need to. They had this conversation all the time. Jaime would stay up too late with his computer games and his drawings; Mima would worry he was wasting his brains on foolishness and more foolishness; Jaime would point out his straight As; Mima would say that foolishness always catches up to a person sooner or later. Usually, she would launch into a lecture about his mother and the groundbreaking work she had done so many years ago, and his father and all the sacrifices he’d made. But not today. Maybe because it was summer vacation. Maybe because she knew that his best friends, Dash Ursu and Eli Avasthi, were both already at camp and Jaime would be alone till school started again. Maybe she really did like the zombie fighter and his awesome boots.
“Come on, lazy boy. Get out of bed and I’ll make you some eggs,” Mima said, and swept from the room.
Jaime climbed from the bed, stretched. He fed his hamster-hogs, Napolean and Tyrone, both girls. Napolean curled up in his palm the way she always did, naked little elf feet sticking straight up. Her “quills” had been rendered filmy and fluffy by the genetic engineering, and she emitted little happy squeaks as he rubbed her soft belly. Tyrone, on the other hand, squealed indignantly when he tried to catch her. She took to her wheel and ran like she was trying to power the entire cage for liftoff to a more just universe. Tyrone was not to be messed with.
“That’s right, Tyrone,” said Jaime. “Don’t let anybody get you down.”
The delicious smell of eggs and peppers wafted down the hall and into his room, so he put Napolean back in the cage. He pulled on his favorite painter’s pants and a Mister Terrific T-shirt, washed up, and slouched toward the kitchen. The short hallway was lined floor to ceiling with photographs of his whole family, his grandparents when they were young, long before his granddad passed. But mostly the pictures were of his parents—his mom splashing in the surf with her brother and sister on a beach in Trinidad, his father running on a soccer field in college, his mom again working in her first laboratory. As he did every morning, Jaime paused in front of his favorite, a picture of his mother holding a chubby little boy on her lap, both of them laughing, bright silver smiles in happy brown faces. She looked so young in the picture, too young for the chubby little boy to be hers, but she’d been thirty-two and a doctor when the photo was taken. It was the last photo his father ever took of his mother. It seemed impossible that a woman whose smile was so radiant had died just a few weeks later and that the little boy was now as tall as she was then.
“If this food gets cold, I will be forced to feed it to your Franken-rodents,” Mima called.
He touched the frame of the photo once, then tore his eyes away from the picture. “Coming.”
Jaime sat at the table just as Mima scooped some eggs, onions, and peppers onto his plate. “What’s up for you today, Mima?”
Mima exchanged Mozart’s Fortieth for Tito Puente’s “Oye Como Va.” She waved her spatula to the beat. “Oh, Mr. Perlmutter complained that the moldings around his window need to be caulked, that the Morningstarr seal is coming loose again. And the Hornshaws have a leaking bathroom sink. And the Ms. Gomezes are having trouble with the air-conditioning.”
Mima had been the building manager of 354 W. 73rd Street for more than thirty years. Delicate as she looked, she could snake a drain, plaster a ceiling, replace a lock, refinish a floor, rewire a washing machine, unclog a toilet, get out a juice stain, install a ceiling fan, operate a jigsaw, douse a kitchen fire, program a cable box, and probably survive in the wild with only a nail file and a thimble. Jaime’s dad said he got his mechanical aptitude from Mima and not Jaime’s grandfather, who could barely operate a toaster without injuring himself.
Jaime took a bite of the eggs. His dad would be in Sudan for three months, working to start up a new solar power plant. The money was too good to pass up, he’d said. But Jaime couldn’t help wishing he’d passed it up anyway.
“Did Dad call this morning?”
“No,” said Mima, “but you know how busy he gets.”
“He’s always busy,” Jaime muttered.
“Your father has sacrificed a lot for you, mi vida.”
Jaime nodded and shoveled more eggs into his mouth so he wouldn’t get another lecture on hard work, sacrifice, respecting one’s elders, and cleaning one’s plate after one’s grandmother toils over the stove to feed you, lazy boy. Besides, he was starving.
He was halfway through a second helping of eggs when he finally heard the voices outside in the hallway, a sort of hum that got louder and louder, cutting into Tito’s drums. Mima must have heard the hum, too, because she turned off the music. By the time she did, however, the voices had gone quiet.
“Cricket and Otto?” Jaime said.
“Those two have worn their mother out,” Mima said. “She stays inside her apartment, slumped in front of the TV like one of your zombies. And this is why I didn’t want that TV.”
Jaime didn’t bother explaining that zombies wouldn’t exactly appreciate TV. He took one last bite of eggs and went to the door. He opened it to find a man so short that Jaime looked straight over the top of his head before even registering anyone was there. The man thrust a packet of papers past Jaime to his grandmother, who had come to the door. “Have a nice day,” the man said, his voice toneless as the whine of an insect.
Mima took the papers and said, “What are these?” but the man was already whirring away.
Jaime stepped into the hall. At one end of the passage, an impossibly, unreasonably, insanely tall man waited at the elevator. He nodded at Jaime as if in greeting, but Jaime had never seen him before. The little man reached his companion. The elevator opened and the two stepped inside, turning around to face Jaime. The pair of them seemed like something out of a comic book, one so stretched out and hollow cheeked and mole specked, the other so punched down and razor burned and lizard lipped. Jaime itched to draw them. As the elevator doors closed, the little man waggled his fingers. Bye-bye.
“Did you hear?”
Jaime turned his head toward the other end of the hallway. Tess Biedermann stood in front of her open apartment door, her hand tugging at the leash of her ginormous spotted cat, her face greenish and crumpled like a tissue.
Jaime didn’t know Tess well, but he knew her well enough to know that it would take something awful to make her look like that.
His own throat felt strangely tight when he said, “Hear what?”