Gingersnap

by Patricia Reilly Giff

  I kept my eye on her as I chewed on the roll. In front of me, waves crashed against the blowing sand. I put Theresa back in her case, talking to her softly. She stared up at me. I was all she had. Not a very satisfying family for a turtle.

  Once, I’d tried to figure out how many people loved me. Rob, of course. My mother and father, when they were alive. My teacher Mrs. Murtha had told me that I was a delight. She’d put her hand on the mess of curls on my head. “You’re as organized as your hair,” she’d said, laughing.

  I remembered two goldfish Rob had bought me when we first came to the house. They were buried out near the pond with two little tan stones on top.

  “Don’t be sad, Jayna,” Rob had said as we dug them in. “Goldfish live only a short time, and you gave them a happy life.”

  I wiped the hot mustard off the edge of my lip and, almost in a daze from the fiery sun, went down the boardwalk steps.

  The sand spilled into my shoes, weighing me down. I pulled them off and took a few steps. It was a surprise. The sand was so hot I could hardly bear it against my feet. I ran toward the water, the strap of my purse rubbing against my shoulder, and circled a pair of striped beach umbrellas.

  At last, I stood at the water’s edge, feeling its icy coldness. The sand underneath my toes was silky, sliding away from my feet; salty waves swirled against my bare legs.

  Mrs. Murtha had said once that if all the mountains flattened out, the oceans would cover the land a mile high. I pictured that, the highs covering the lows, until all of it was even, water from the Atlantic meeting the great waves of the Pacific. I saw myself flying over that water, reaching out, searching.…

  My throat burned. I dipped my fingers into the surf almost as if I could touch him: Stay alive, Rob, wherever you are.

  I reached into my pocket. My fingers grasped the stone girl. I felt its smoothness. What had Rob said that day? It’s been around forever, rolling down from some mountain, or coming up from under the sea.

  Then I remembered Theresa. I glanced over my shoulder to be sure she was all right in her case. Yes, she was there, but …

  I shaded my eyes with my hand.

  Something was wrong.

  Where was my suitcase?

  “I knew it,” the voice said. “You’ve lost it. Didn’t I tell you?”

  “Someone took it. Someone must have …”

  “It makes no difference. Gone is gone.”

  In a panic, I ran through the sand, scooping up my shoes, and went up the stairs to look under the bench. I ran up and down on the boardwalk, hardly paying attention to the splinters stabbing into my bare feet. A few people walked along, and two children emptied sand out of their shoes.

  No one paid attention to a girl zigzagging along, rushing backward, bending over to look under benches.

  It was gone. I went back to Theresa, who slept peacefully in the shade of her case.

  I took a couple of breaths and squeezed the water out of the bottom of my skirt. All I had was what I was wearing.

  My hand went to my chest. The money was there under my blouse. But I was a mess. Mustard stains, mud, a spot of orange soda.

  What would I do for clothes?

  “Don’t worry,” the voice said.

  I couldn’t pay attention to her. How could I go to the bakery looking like this? Mrs. Alman, the foster woman, was always talking about street urchins.

  That was what I looked like, a street urchin.

  “You have money. We’ll buy something. A bead necklace for me,” the voice said. “I favor pink. I might even be that movie actress, Carole Lombard.”

  “Killed in a plane crash.”

  “No good,” she said.

  It was impossible, all of it. Pink necklaces, no clothes. Children of the World was gone, and I’d seen the last of my New York State geography book.

  And then the worst.

  I’d lost the recipe book. I whispered the address over and over, and then I trudged back to the subway to ask where Carey Street was.

  Chapter 10

  The houses on Carey Street were tall and brown, with shops on the first floors. An old poster, half torn, flapped on a telephone pole. It showed a man with a beard and a red, white, and blue top hat. He was pointing: I Want YOU for U.S. Army.

  But what I saw, what I’d been waiting to see, was the bakery. The awning stretched out over the street, with the stripes faded and small rips in the scalloped edges, but my name, Gingersnap, was still there.

  Would the woman with braids be there, too? Would she, by some miracle, be my grandmother?

  I backed up against a splintery telephone pole. Now that I’d come all this way, what would I say? How could I possibly tell her my mother called me Gingersnap when I was a baby? How could I say she might be my grandmother, when Rob wasn’t sure? I didn’t even have the blue recipe book anymore. It was somewhere in the sand, or floating in the water by now.

  Underneath the awning was a wrought-iron fence that surrounded a few metal tables. They were empty now except for an old man drinking coffee from a mug. His dog lay on the cracked pavement, half asleep, his head leaning on the man’s shoe. It was a white pug, with a skinny little curl of a tail.

  What had Rob said not long ago? We’ll have a dog someday, a pair of cats, more fish.

  “Go inside,” the voice next to me said softly. “See her now.”

  I couldn’t make myself move. I glanced at a shop across the street. In the window was a frilly dress, as pink as my nail polish. Next to that was a bookshop. A woman with a pageboy haircut hopped around barefoot in the small window. She waved one pudgy hand when she saw me.

  A good start. I waved back.

  Along the street were empty windows, some on the first floor, others on the second. One had a sign: GONE TO WAR. BACK SOON.

  Soon.

  “Elise is there,” the voice said. “Go ahead, don’t be afraid.”

  I ran my fingers through my hair; my scalp was covered with grains of sand from the wind. I straightened the collar of my blouse and walked up the street, making a wide path around the man’s dog.

  The dog sprang up and growled. I had to smile. She was small as a cat.

  I bent down to see her wrinkled face, and she retreated under the table, looking up at me with worried brown eyes.

  “I call her Ella, after Ella Cinders in the comics,” the man said, holding a coffee cup in hands that were spattered with age spots. “She’s not as brave as she’d like to be.”

  I liked the look of the man. His hair was thick and white, his mustache a little darker, and his face was gentle as he smiled down at the dog.

  I’d tell Rob it was a pug I wanted. White with great dark eyes.

  With a tinkle of a small overhead bell, I was inside the bakery. It smelled of ginger and fresh bread. I blinked against the dimness and caught my breath.

  The girl I’d seen in the picture was behind the counter. Her braids had become a gray bun on the back of her head. She was much older and bone thin but still beautiful. She had to be Elise, the name on the cover of the recipe book.

  Maybe she belonged to me.

  I stood back, half listening to the radio behind the counter as a customer complained. “The last cookies tasted like cardboard.”

  “We’ll meet again,” Vera Lynn sang on the radio. “Don’t know where, don’t know when …”

  I waited, putting the cat carrier on the floor and flexing my fingers, which ached from carrying it. I glanced at the trays inside the glass cases. They held a few loaves of bread with shiny crusts, two or three Danish, and a row of gingersnaps. On a shelf were coffee rings, round and dotted with fruit. A high frosted cake was on top of the counter; small pink roses were looped around the edge.

  The customer tapped her foot impatiently as the woman behind the counter slipped a raisin ring into a box, wound string around it, and snapped the end of the string with her fingers.

  “I’m bringing it right back,” the customer said, “if this one is as bad a
s the cookies.”

  Elise leaned forward. “You can’t get butter. Eggs are almost as scarce. And sugar is gold. Remember, the government allows only a little bit at a time.” She shook her head. “Every time I have to tear a stamp out of my ration book for the grocer, I wonder how I’m going to make the sweet cakes everyone loves.”

  Something about her voice was unusual. An accent from long ago? I watched her as the impatient woman went out the door and a boy stepped forward. He leaned against the counter. “I thought that raisin ring was pretty good myself,” he said. “But what can you expect when the sugar tastes like gold?”

  “Ah, Andrew.” Elise raised her hands to smooth back her hair. Some of it had escaped her bun and hung in wisps here and there, almost like a halo around her face.

  In the picture I’d seen, her eyes had seemed dark, but they were turquoise, so clear and bright they were almost shocking. Did she look like Rob and me? I couldn’t tell.

  The boy’s hair was a mop over his forehead. He had a fresh face with a scattering of freckles across his nose and cheeks. He put a couple of coins on the counter and Elise shoved them back. I took a step forward as she slid a bear claw from the tray; it was covered with vanilla frosting, some of it seeping between the claws.

  Elise held it out to him. He hesitated but finally reached out and took it. “I’m bringing it right back if it isn’t better than the last one,” he said, mimicking the woman exactly.

  They both grinned.

  “It’s your own baking, after all,” she said as he ducked outside.

  She turned to the next person, and the bell over the door sounded again. A couple of teenagers came in, laughing and pushing each other. Would I ever have the chance to talk to her?

  The ghost made a sound.

  I moved closer to the counter and stood next to a man she was helping.

  He pointed to a tray of rolls. “A dozen.”

  Elise shook a bag open and counted out the rolls.

  “Baker’s dozen,” she said. “Thirteen.”

  The man put the money on the counter, and a woman leaned over me. “I’m here for the cake,” she told Elise.

  The radio news interrupted the singer. “The destroyer USS Little has been sunk by a kamikaze attack. Two hundred eighty survivors have been picked up by another ship.”

  Not Rob’s ship. My hand trembled and I reached out to steady myself. I hit the edge of the tray that held the frosted cake. Somehow it teetered on the edge of the counter.

  Was it the ghost who tried to right it? Maybe I’d seen her small hand.

  It was too late. The cake slid down the front of the counter, leaving smears of frosting on the glass and on my dress.

  Elise was around in front in a moment. She didn’t look at me or the cake, which was in a lump on the floor.

  “An accident,” she said to the woman. “I’ll have another one in a few hours. I’ll bring it to your house. It’s on the corner of Eighth, right?”

  I darted a look at the front door, but the old man was coming in with the dog. I turned and ran through the velvet curtain at the back of the store and went out the door.

  “A cake,” the voice was saying. “Only a cake.”

  I was in a yard with a falling-down wooden fence that surrounded a tangle of weeds. I didn’t stop. I went through the gate along a gravel path, with fences on both sides of me, and headed toward the street. I held the little stone girl for comfort.

  Where could I go? I didn’t care.

  But the ghost’s voice in back of me said, “You’ve come a long way. Don’t give up.”

  But I had.

  Chapter 11

  I was alone, almost alone. The ghost’s tapping footsteps were behind me. At the end of the alley was a street. The man, with his dog, Ella, walked by slowly, leaning on a cane.

  A couple of boys were playing stickball, calling back and forth to each other. The man stopped to watch, Ella growling at them from behind his leg. The boys weren’t worried; one bent down and patted her head.

  Another smacked at the ball and missed. It bounced down the alley toward me, and the boy bounced after it.

  “Get it!” he yelled.

  I reached out, too late. The ball kept going, bouncing off the fence.

  The boy grinned at me as he passed. I saw he was the one from the bakery. What had Elise called him? Andrew?

  I stepped back and leaned against the fence as he scooped up the ball. “You’ll never be a catcher for the Giants,” he said.

  “I’m a Yankees fan anyway,” I called after him.

  “Impossible,” he said.

  Then the man was gone, and the boys disappeared, one by one.

  What was I going to do now?

  How many things I’d broken at my foster mother’s house! And there was Celine’s almost-genuine Ming vase. But ruining the cake seemed so much worse.

  A clock chimed somewhere nearby. Five in the afternoon. The day was endless.

  Where could I go?

  How could I take that long bus ride back to North River and walk up the hill to Celine’s house?

  I couldn’t think of that.

  Suppose I went back to the beach instead, to the silky sand and the waves that somehow led to Rob?

  It would be dark soon, everyone gone from the beach. I’d be alone.

  I was alone.

  I stood there against the splintery fence, my feet pulsing with fatigue, my face sunburned from the beach.

  “Go back,” the voice said again.

  I shook my head.

  “At least to her garden, Jayna,” the voice said. “The fence is high. You can hide and no one will see you there. You’ll be safe.”

  I couldn’t think of anything else.

  We walked back to Elise’s fence; it was as messy as the garden with jagged edges. There were spaces where some of the narrow slats must have been, like missing teeth on a Halloween pumpkin.

  I pushed the gate open, then waded through the weeds. Some of them were stiff and brown from last year, but underneath was the green of new growth.

  I sank down in the center of the garden, listening to the buzz, the click, the saw of contented insects. Near me, a cricket climbed a green spike of grass, bending it over. Above my head a house wren sang. A loud song for such a small brown bird.

  Why did this garden remind me of the pond? There was no water, just a bit of mud that meandered around the side of the fence.

  Still, there was something: the smell of things growing or the earth underneath.

  I opened Theresa’s case. “Catch a bug for yourself.”

  She lumbered out and stopped. How cautious she was. She raised one foot, her claws thick. She took one step, raised her foot high, and took another, the weeds flattening out behind her.

  I pulled up a narrow blade of onion grass and sucked on it, the edges sharp against my tongue. It tasted almost like a soup I sometimes made.

  I took out Rob’s stone and ran it over my forehead. It was cool against my face. I turned it over in my hands. For the first time, I realized the dark lines were ridges. I wondered what had made them, maybe hundreds of years ago. If only I were home in that house with the blue roof. If only Rob were safe.

  All was quiet now. It seemed as if everything had gone still. Even the insects had stopped their chirping.

  I sank deeper into the weeds. The sun was going down. I had a quick thought of winter, which was months away. But it would come, and when it did, where would I be?

  I pictured the war in the Pacific, the island of Okinawa. Would it be over by then? Would Rob be home, telling me it had all been a mistake, that he’d never been missing? Would he say, We’ll open a restaurant in Brooklyn? Would he say, You’ll make soup?

  The ghost sighed.

  Theresa left a trail behind her as she moved slowly away from me. I closed my eyes, telling myself it was just for a moment.…

  And slept.

  When I awoke, it was almost dark. A square of light came from the kitch
en window of the bakery. I saw Elise moving back and forth.

  My grandmother?

  I wanted that. I wanted that thin woman with the lilt in her voice to belong to Rob and me. Next to Rob’s coming home, I wanted it more than anything.

  Without thinking, I stood up. I was filthy, dirt on my legs, my shoes scuffed, and my dress! Wrinkled and stained. How could I …

  “You could,” the voice whispered.

  I had to.

  An old path led to the back door. She stood at the stove. Was she cooking something for her dinner?

  I’d tell her that I’d stop and think from now on. I’d be careful. I’d never ruin a cake again … never.

  I knocked on the door and she turned toward me, tilting her head.

  “Please,” I said, not sure that she could even hear me through the glass. But she came to the door and opened it. She was surprised to see me again, or maybe at the way I looked.

  “Could I come in?” I asked. “Could I talk to you for a minute?”

  Chapter 12

  Elise nodded and stood back. There were chairs around a large floury table, and I sank into one, rubbing my eyes against the light.

  “Are you hungry?” She glanced back at the stove. “I made potato pancakes with a little meat on the side.”

  I nodded, suddenly starving.

  “There’s something comforting about potatoes,” she said. “Something soothing.”

  Last winter I’d cooked potato soup. And that was exactly what I’d called it: Soothing Soup.

  The pancake she put in front of me was golden; the meat was spicy. I breathed in the steam that rose from it. I took huge bites. Celine would have had a fit. I tried to slow down.

  Elise sat across from me, eating, too. I could tell she was watching me, but I didn’t look up.

  “I don’t know what the meat is,” she said. “I take whatever the butcher has these days.”

  “It’s good,” I whispered.

  We kept eating, the sound of the wall clock clicking. I could see the ghost—part of her, anyway: a small hand with a ring on her finger.

  “Where do you belong?” Elise said at last.