The Crying Rocks

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  “Four,” says Vernon. “I saw my babies. I’d been doing some addition and . . .”

  “We still didn’t know they were Vern’s, did we?” Roger says, looking around at his brothers. They shake their heads.

  “I knew,” Vernon said. “When I saw them, there wasn’t any doubt in my mind. I didn’t go up to Sylvie, though. Mary Louise was with me at the service.” He gazes across at Joelle, his eyes turning red and watery. “I looked at you . . . and little Sylvia . . . from a distance,” he says.

  When Joelle sees his eyes, she feels a prickle come up behind her eyes too, because she’s just figured out something else. Something she hadn’t ever thought possible before.

  “You’re my father, aren’t you?” she says to Vernon.

  He nods.

  “And Aunt Mary Louise never did know it.”

  Vernon shakes his head.

  “Well, couldn’t you at least have told me?” Joelle asks.

  Vernon wipes his eyes like a little child. “I couldn’t. You would’ve told her.”

  “I guess I would,” Joelle has to say. “But would it have been so bad if she knew?”

  “I didn’t know what she’d do. I knew it would hurt her. What if she wanted to leave? I couldn’t’ve stood that. I loved her. She was my good luck.”

  Vernon puts his big hands over his big face and just moans in what sounds to Joelle like pure agony. “I was caught,” he says, muffled behind his hands. “I didn’t know which way to go. So I kept quiet.”

  “And we helped him,” Uncle Roger says, standing up tall. “Don’t blame him, Joelle. You can’t blame anybody. It’s the mess things got into.”

  For a minute Joelle sits where she is, thinking about this. Everybody’s eyes are on her, and she’s trying to get her bearings. Finally, just as Uncle Roger decides to sit down again and Vernon is accepting a tissue from Uncle Jodie’s pocket, she gets them. She stands up.

  “That certainly takes care of everything,” she says, all five feet nine inches of her looking down on her uncles. “Everything except me and Aunt Mary Louise. I see how it is. Now that she’s died, you all can come out of hiding. That’s why you’re here—isn’t it?—because she can’t be. Well, I think it’s rotten,” Joelle says, her voice rising. “I know Aunt Mary Louise would think so too. You went around behind her back. You waited until—”

  “That’s not true, Joelle,” Uncle Jerry protests. “None of us could’ve known your dear aunt was going to leave us when she did.”

  “Mary Louise was a star, we all say so,” Uncle Greg adds, nodding. “She was batting one thousand in our book. She loved Vern and brought you up good and always kept her head when the going got tough. I think she might even have guessed something wasn’t right, and kept her mouth shut.”

  Joelle doesn’t buy it. She thinks she sees the whole story now. If this really were baseball, she’d be in the ninth inning, with the last batter up and a big, lopsided score against her.

  “Get out of this house,” she’s suddenly yelling at the top of her lungs. “Now!” she yells. “This is Aunt Mary Louise’s house. She still lives here. You can’t get rid of her that easy. Go on, all of you. Get out!”

  * * *

  There’s a long silence in the room. Finally, the uncles get up off their chairs, heads hanging, and go outside to the backyard, followed by Vernon.

  “C’mon to the shed and let her cool off,” Joelle hears him say. They all lumber across the muddy yard—she’s watching their every move from the kitchen window—and disappear inside with the chicks, which are just in the process of hatching out for Vernon’s next big delivery. With all this coming and going from the shed, it’s pretty obvious to Joelle now who his secret backers are!

  Joelle gets a can of Coke from the fridge, walks out to the front porch, and strides up and down a few times, venting into the chilly 5:00 p.m. air. It might be spring, but winter’s not letting go. Farther north, Chicago’s even colder, she’s heard. Icy winds off Lake Michigan. Snow in the streets. The biggest drifts last through April some years.

  Looking down one of those canyons of Chicago skyscrapers she’s seen on TV, Joelle catches a glimpse of Sylvie with her twins, Sylvia and Sissie, crossing a busy street. Sylvie, instructing her girls to look both ways, holding their hands hard—too hard!—while the traffic roars by. There is Sylvie’s long black hair rippled by the wind, streaked across her dark face as they turn into the park. Now she is showing her daughters how to make an Indian trail in the snow, as their ancestors did. Put your foot exactly into the footprint of the person in front of you, she explains. In this way, you can hide and fool your enemy. Many can travel under cover of one.

  Armed with the uncles’ new facts, Joelle believes she remembers this actual scene. She gazes across the divide of years and watches as her footprints tuck neatly inside her mother’s big ones. Behind her comes her sister Sylvia, stumbling and breathing hard but doing her best. All this city and traffic and snow are too much for her. Her scared eyes look up and:

  “Don’t worry, Sylvia, I’ll take care of you,” Sissie tells her. “Follow me. You can do it.”

  And she does! Her little foot comes down exactly in the middle of Mom’s and Sissie’s prints and immediately gets lost. Good work, Sylvia! No one would ever know she was there.

  16

  JOELLE IS STILL OUT ON the porch, beginning to feel the cold and wondering what her next move will be, when she sees a shadow depart from the sidewalk across the street and come toward her. She recognizes it at once.

  “Tonto!”

  “Buenas tardes.” He approaches carefully through the prickly hedge. “I thought I’d just come by for a minute and . . . find out how you are,” he ends lamely.

  “I’m alive, as you see.” She wants to smile but finds herself frowning. Her guard has gone up. It’s obvious he didn’t “just come by.” He’s been out there on the street lying in wait, spying on her, hardly better than the Secret Princesses. She can’t stand being tracked that way.

  “How did you know where I lived?” she demands.

  Carlos shrugs. He looks at her, not angrily as she deserves. His patience always surprises her.

  “Look, I’m in the middle of something,” she says more kindly. “It’s not a good time.”

  “I saw all the cars in your driveway. I guess you have company.”

  “I guess I do.”

  “Okay,” he says, and turns to go, but some awkwardness in the way he moves, a peculiar angle of his head, sends Joelle a message. She knows him well enough to read him. Something has happened.

  “Carlos, wait. What is it?”

  He looks back with reluctance, not eager to be shot down again.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m having a crazy day.”

  “Me too,” he admits. “I’ve been getting some things straight with my father. Last night when I came back from the park, I couldn’t sleep. He was awake too, and we started talking.”

  The park. To Joelle, it seems an age ago. She has to struggle to get on his wavelength. “Did you talk about Daniel?”

  Carlos nods. “It was being with Queenie last night. I kept thinking about the Crying Rocks.”

  “Did you tell your dad that you remembered . . . ?”

  “I told him,” Carlos says. He takes a deep breath. “Joelle, he said it couldn’t have happened that way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I heard couldn’t have been Daniel. He was hurt too bad.”

  “How does he know?”

  “He said Daniel’s jaw was broken. He couldn’t have opened his mouth to make a noise like that. He couldn’t even speak. It puzzled my dad later, wondering what I could have heard. He never brought it up, though. He didn’t want to remind me of the accident. He was hoping I could forget.”

  “Well, you almost did.”

  “He never blamed me, either,” Carlos says, sounding as if he can’t believe it. “In fact, the opposite; he said I’d been brave. When he w
as carrying Daniel out, he said I hung in and was tough.”

  “I’m glad you talked,” Joelle says. “You must feel a lot better.”

  Carlos nods.

  “What does he think you heard?”

  “He didn’t say. I was a little kid. He probably believes I imagined everthing.”

  “Did you?”

  “Well, did I?” Carlos asks her straight back. “You were there, you heard those cries. Did you imagine them?”

  “No. And they had nothing to do with the wind.”

  “So what were they?”

  They stand silent on the porch, looking out at the darkening street. Into Joelle’s mind comes that hulking mass of glacial boulders, and the swamp beside them, and the forest behind. She hears Queenie’s voice say again:

  “A ghost is a ghost. It can do what it wants.”

  She turns toward Carlos. “Relatives of mine have come to visit.”

  “I saw them out in the backyard. They’re the guys from the funeral, aren’t they? The ones who look like you?”

  “Right.” Joelle glances at him. “You didn’t say they looked like me before.”

  “You would’ve been mad. You don’t like people telling you things like that, remember?”

  “They’re Narragansett Indians. Did you know that?”

  “I might have,” Carlos says. He’s being extra careful.

  “They’ve been filling me in on some things.”

  “I won’t ask what,” Carlos says, moving away. “I know it’s your business.” He walks fast toward the sidewalk.

  “Wait,” Joelle calls, “I want to tell you about Vernon. Do you have to leave now?”

  “I have to,” he answers over his shoulder. He’s been burnt once too often. She can see he doesn’t want to risk it again.

  “But I’m not sure what I should do.”

  “You’ll figure it out.”

  “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow?”

  “Maybe.” He doesn’t look around.

  “Thanks for coming over!” Joelle shouts after him. This time there’s no answer. She watches as the dark outline of his departing body blurs into the street shadows and disappears.

  * * *

  When the uncles return from the chick shed a half hour later, knocking cautiously on the back door, Joelle is waiting for them in the living room with the lamps turned on. The sun has gone down. Outside it’s that blue gray dark of early evening, and Carlos was right—she’s figured things out. There are a number of matters that have yet to be addressed. Joelle intends to shed light on all of them. First and foremost:

  “Where is my sister Sylvia?”

  The uncles are coming through the kitchen, grabbing up handfuls of pretzels from the bowl on the counter, when she puts this question to them.

  “Now, Joelle. Don’t be rushing things,” Uncle Jerry says. “We were thinking of going out for a bite, down to the Red Dragon. Do you like Chinese? We’d be honored to escort our niece to dinner.”

  This, Joelle suspects, is another trick. The uncles have been plotting how to get around her out in the shed. It’s laughable to think the only ploy they could come up with was food.

  “I am not that dim,” Joelle tells them. “Neither am I forgiving you for one thing. The only reason I’m letting you back in this house is that I need some answers. So, if we’re going to have Chinese, somebody better go get it. And by the way, don’t you all have families waiting for you somewhere? Did somebody invite you to spend the night?”

  “Joelle, honey,” says Uncle Greg, “you don’t have any idea of what happens when us boys get reunited.”

  “About once in a blue moon since Ma died,” Uncle Jodie says, shaking his head.

  “Well, what happens,” Uncle Greg goes on, “is that we stay and powwow a good long time, till we feel back together again. For myself, I took off from the Pequot Museum till Tuesday. How about all of you?”

  “I’m good through tomorrow,” Uncle Jerry says. “And for your information, I’ve got three boys and a girl over in Pawcatuck, all cousins of yours,” he adds to Joelle.

  “I’m out of the yard till Wednesday,” Uncle Jodie chimes in. “Live up in Pittsfield, Mass., these days. Two kids in Connecticut with their ma.”

  “Well, Vern and I signed out from the turkey ranch for all of this week,” says Roger. “Now that Vern’s back to being single like me, we’re thinking to take a little trip over to view the Paw Sox’s opening games. Just a couple of nights, Joelle. Nothing to worry about.”

  Uncle Franko’s not so organized. He says he’ll have to call in sick to the R.I. Highway Department. Oh, yes, and he’s married with five.

  While this summation is under way, Vernon goes in search of his wallet and heads off to the Red Dragon to get the food.

  “There’s another question I have,” Joelle says as they wait. “Why did I need to ride a freight train from Chicago?” She turns to Uncle Roger. “Here you get your mother a first-class sleeping ticket, and you can’t even put me in a passenger car?”

  “Good question,” Roger says. “I’ll shoot that over to Jerry. He set it up.”

  “We had to get you out fast, is the answer,” Uncle Jerry says, shrugging. “We were one step ahead of the law.”

  “You’re kidding,” Joelle says.

  “I am not. You had foster care on your tail. Once you disappear into that system, it takes wild horses to get you out. See, by then, we saw how Vern wasn’t going to run interference to get you back after the accident. Even though he cared, he was too scared of losing his Mary Louise. So we all pitched in to take action.”

  Uncle Roger nods. “We wanted you. You were part of our Sylvie, crazy as she was.”

  Joelle looks away fast. There’s something about the way Roger has said this that, combined with the word “accident,” frightens her.

  “The trouble was,” Uncle Frank continues, “we didn’t have good standing to take you in custody without some proof. It would’ve cost us time and money to convince people out there of what was what, if we ever could. So . . .”

  “We stole you,” Uncle Jerry declares. “Snuck you out of the holding bin where they’d stashed you, put you on the freight, and rode you out of there. I had friends in a couple of convenient places from when I worked in Chicago those two years. We got you on board and that was that. The authorities never hardly blinked.”

  “They let a little child just disappear?” Joelle says, shocked.

  “Oh, honey, the way things were back then, they could’ve lost a truckload without too much trouble. You know, foster kids aren’t a high priority to the state politicians. They can’t vote yet.”

  “But I still don’t understand. What happened to my mother? And where was Sylvia?”

  The next second the front door flies open, and there is Vernon, arms piled high with Styrofoam containers. Everybody jumps up to help carry them into the kitchen.

  “Looks like Vern got enough to feed a Continental army,” Uncle Franko declares.

  “It’ll boil down,” Vernon replies, and everybody laughs.

  “That’s for sure,” Uncle Greg snorts. “Over at the Pequot Museum we cart out a ton of trash a day, just from lunch and dinner.”

  “This country’s sinking under a mountain of rubbish, and they call it progress,” Uncle Franko says, shaking his head. “I’d just like to know what and where they think they’re progressing to.”

  In the midst of this chatter, Joelle is working away on trying to solve the mystery of Sylvie and Sylvia. She plugs the word “accident” into her equation of known facts and comes up with an image. It’s a high-rise city apartment building. Porches stacked up the side, one on top of the other. Third floor.

  Uncle Roger, settling down next to her with a full plate of food, hears the result.

  “My sister fell, didn’t she?” Joelle tells him.

  Uncle Roger stops moving. He sits absolutely still, not looking at her.

  “It wasn’t me who fell, was it? The story got m
ixed up. It was her.”

  “It was her, not you.”

  “And she didn’t make it.”

  “No, she didn’t,” Roger says, a little catch in his voice.

  Joelle nods. “I always wondered—how I could’ve lived through that fall with not even one scar to show for it. I used to look all over my body, and I never found any. Now I know why.”

  She stares around the room. A tightness is rising in her chest. She dreads the next question, but she has to ask it.

  “Sylvia wasn’t thrown, was she? That’s the story that came down, but I never believed it.”

  The chitchat has stopped. Uncle Jerry and Uncle Jodie are standing in the kitchen doorway gazing at Joelle while uncles Greg, Roger, and Franko are sitting stiff as boards, their plates on their knees. Joelle guesses they were hoping to put this off until after supper.

  “Did Sylvia get thrown, or didn’t she?” Joelle demands.

  Vernon says softly, “She didn’t. They went down together.”

  Joelle looks straight ahead. She takes a little sip of air and turns to Roger, sitting beside her.

  “You mean, somebody else went too?” she asks, and Roger cannot answer. He glances across at Vernon for help.

  “Joelle, there was no somebody else,” Vernon says. “Sylvie would never take her kids to somebody else, that was the problem.”

  “So who went down?” Joelle says, even though she knows the answer. It’s right in front of her, clear as day, like the answers on the tests at school that never give her any trouble.

  “My mother?” she says. “Sylvie took my sister down?”

  Vernon puts his plate on the floor with a clatter and leans toward her.

  “Joelle, this is what we found out, after. In the end, Sylvie wasn’t bringing little Sylvia to the doctors anymore. She saw there wasn’t anything they could do. But even more, what we think now is, she didn’t want to leave her girl in the hospital. Sylvia was real weak. Her heart was bad and she couldn’t breathe right. She had been in the hospital a lot of times before and she hated it. She was terrified of the hospital. Your mother was determined to keep her home.”