A Frenzy of Sparks: A Novel

by Kristin Fields

  “Even you’re not that stupid.” Her voice came out choked. Lorraine was on her feet. The front door slammed behind her. Ray looked between Gia and the door, still smug but wavering under the surface. The silence was worse for Ray than anything she could say.

  Agnes was on the front lawn now, barefoot, staring at Leo in the tree.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “It’s scraping the friggin’ window.”

  “Let your father do that on the weekend.” Agnes paced, her skirt blowing around her knees, like a balloon that a little child had let go by mistake, zigzagging in the sky. The sawing continued. Ray watched Leo the same way her father and Uncle Frank scoped out horses bucking at the gates before putting money down at Aqueduct. She couldn’t blame Ray for not wanting to pick up garbage cans or supervise any more than she wanted to make Bundt cakes. She didn’t care about homes or lawns or dream about raising kids any more than Ray did. They were alike in that way, and yet . . .

  “Where’s the rest of the money you owe me?” Asking felt greasy, but her boat depended on it. And she didn’t trust he’d remember on his own.

  Ray unfolded five twenties from his pocket but didn’t let go.

  “Keep her company on Friday, a’right? She’ll be fine. It’s not as big a deal as she thinks.”

  Gia snatched the money from his hand. She would’ve done it anyway, but now he’d think it was his idea. Great. She stuffed the bills in her pocket.

  Agnes went inside just as the branch snapped and Leo fell with it. Gia’s breath caught, but Leo was up again, cursing softly, dragging the branch to the curb. Only her brother could fall out of a tree and keep going. Ray was the same. Her father, too, but not Tommy or Uncle Frank. Certainly not the women. It made for good soldiers. Or Hells Angels.

  Ray was gone. Somewhere in the commotion, he’d slithered off. She checked her pocket, but the money hadn’t gone with him.

  Across the canal, tarps flapped over hollow windows. The insulation was up, making the houses look like trash bags. It was interesting to see a house constructed, all the guts concealed within to make it work. There were a lot of ugly things hidden inside a house.

  Lorraine didn’t come around. She left for school with her head down and skipped out early, picking up frozen dinners for Aunt Diane before heading to the hospital with her nursing books. She took extra shifts at the bakery but didn’t look up when Gia passed by, just busied herself with tying boxes and restocking trays. Even at night, the light in her bedroom was always off.

  “What’s with her?” her mother asked as she parked and shut off the engine. Lorraine walked ahead on the sidewalk, not turning to see whose car it was.

  “Don’t know,” Gia lied.

  “Full sentences, please,” Agnes huffed, annoyed. “Maybe I should talk to her.”

  “Just leave her alone. She’s mad at Ray.”

  “Over what?”

  Gia shrugged. That was already saying too much.

  “You just said you didn’t know, but you do. Why should I believe you now?”

  Gia shrugged again, but this time, instead of being annoyed, Agnes held up two hands and wiggled her fingers, threatening a tickle. This had worked when Gia was eight, but now the idea of her mother’s hands so close to her new, growing parts made Gia flinch. Her mother looked almost desperate for Gia to be a foot shorter, kicking the seat, begging not to be tickled but really wishing it, her hands and face sticky with secret ice cream they’d picked up on the way home. Just girls. Even her mother realized it was ridiculous and sighed, dropping her hands to her lap.

  “I’ll just pop over real quick. Take these in, would you?”

  The car door opened and closed. Her mother swished along the sidewalk, catching up to Lorraine. Through the windshield, the two of them looked like an episode of Leave It to Beaver.

  The grocery bags slumped as cold things sweated inside. Gia left them in a heap on the kitchen table, flung the keys on the counter. She had a new Agatha Christie novel in her backpack, and those were always fun, even with the long, improbable whodunit explanation at the end, but she liked looking for clues. She always wondered what her father would think of one, if it was anything like what he did all day. She spread out on her bed and cracked the cover, smelled the pages, proud to be the first person to check it out of the library. The first! So when a pebble hit her window, and then a stick, Gia ignored them until the third stone shook the window. It would break glass. She threw the window open. It was Ray.

  He held up a brown bag and raised an eyebrow. “Come down for a sec.”

  Gia rolled her eyes and slammed the window. Was this what it would be like if boys came around for her? Throwing things at her window, their faces tipped back and triangular, and she, from above, holding the power to open the window or leave it shut. It was nice to hold the upper hand.

  “Is that Ray out there?” her mother called from the kitchen, clicking the stove on and pouring oil into a pan.

  “Yes,” Gia mumbled.

  “For you?” The optimism in her mother’s voice was terrible, as if Gia’s status had miraculously gone up overnight, a leaf turned, the It’s a Wonderful Life miracle she’d been praying for transpiring on the front lawn in a shopping bag. Cue the snow. Gia ignored her.

  Ray was under the branch Leo had lopped off, the poor tree unbalanced now. Raw. He smiled and held out the bag. A black dress and a shoebox were tucked inside.

  “Oh hell no.” It might as well be a bag of barnacles.

  “Watch your mouth, would you?” His impatience only made her more irritated. “Just take it to her.”

  “Bring it yourself.”

  But Ray just stood there holding the bag to his stomach, the way they used to scoop T-shirts into baskets and fill them with sandbar clams or plastic Easter eggs, desperate to find every last one.

  “What do you want, Gia?”

  Grass scratched her ankles. Her mother was watching from the kitchen window, washing vegetables, as Gia squirmed like an earthworm cut in two. No one had ever asked her what she wanted. Not about the food on her plate, the clothes that showed up in plastic bags from Lorraine’s house, or what she wanted to be when she grew up. Not even what flavor ice cream she wanted from the supermarket.

  “You want to live on this block your whole life?” he pushed on. The bag crinkled. “One day, your parents will move to the apartment like Nonna and Pop Pop, and you’ll live in the main house with your husband and kids, using the same ironing board your mother does, making the same sauce on Sundays. Doesn’t matter if you finish school, Gia, because your husband works. Maybe you’ll drive; maybe you won’t. A new washing machine or a lawn sprinkler will be your Christmas gifts. You’ll sit around making snacks for little parties like my mom . . .” He gestured toward the front porch, where the rabbits were huddled in the cage. “Play canasta with your church friends. Sound good, Gia?”

  Gia stared at Ray, her insides squeezing over each other like eels in a trap.

  “Because I don’t, Gia. I don’t want that. And everyone on this block, your parents, mine, even Aunt Diane, that’s all they want from us. And this”—he shook the bag, but he was still holding it close to his stomach, so close it breathed when he did—“is the only way I know how to change that. So . . .”

  He stared up at the parakeets on the wire. Always swinging. Always flitting, no matter what was happening underneath. A mosquito landed on Gia’s arm, but she didn’t swat it away. Instead, she wished she could trade places with it: stick her straw through someone’s skin and steal tiny bits of blood, fly away with a bloated belly, lay eggs in a bottle cap of rainwater instead of making choices like this.

  “We’re never gonna come up any other way, Gia, not how I see it. Not if your brother ships off to Vietnam, or me, or Tommy. I know what Antonio is. I also get what he can do for us. Do you see that? Look at his life, Gia. He has options.”

  “But you have options too.” Gia kicked at the dirt. More than she had. The whol
e world was one big smoking advertisement for men in bright rooms with chairs tipped back, making important choices. Women were lucky if they could smile in the corner with their tight pencil skirts, tottering around in toothpick heels, one button too many undone on a blouse. That wasn’t her. She was stuck, same as him, under this broken tree, parakeets laughing overhead. Unless the world changed. Or they changed it. She took the bag and held it to her own stomach, where it pressed against her insides and made it harder to breathe.

  “Thank you,” Ray said. He ruffled her hair. He’d done that to Tommy when they were little and Tommy’s legs had pumped four times as hard to keep up with Ray on their bikes, or when Tommy had shared the extra Halloween candy people had dumped in his pumpkin because he was smaller, rounder, but it was a first for Gia.

  “Hey,” he called back, halfway to the curb. “Everyone’s looking at the shadows on the wall. We see the fire.”

  You and I, he meant, his arms swinging freely without the burden of Lorraine’s outfit. The sun gave his hair a red glow. His sneakers silent on the sidewalk.

  Gia lingered in the yard, unsure what to do next now that every choice mattered more. Onions fried on the stove inside. The radio was on, her mother humming along, sweating as heat filled the kitchen. She tucked the bag into the hallway closet as quietly as she could, behind old baseball bats and shoes they’d outgrown a long time ago, then walked to the dock. She climbed into the boat and untied it, pushed off, the metal seats burning against her skin as Gia rowed to the end of the canal and back. The boat cut through the calm water like a needle as she settled into a rhythm, turning at the end of the canal, starting again.

  She would be ready next time, her muscles stronger, eager, practiced, instead of the doubled-over thing she’d been last time. She could do anything her brother could, even Ray. The muscles in her arms woke up. It was easier when it was just her and the water. The boat buoyed under her weight. Water lapped the sides of the boat, cheering her on. The sun was red in the sky, lower on the horizon. All the colors of the sun were trapped in it, waiting for the right time of day, the right atmosphere, just like her.

  Chapter Nine

  The radio was a lonely, low hum in Lorraine’s room, while the curling iron heated in the corner, the hallway heavy with shower steam. A sweating glass of ice ran rivers over the dresser’s edge. After Pop Pop had died, Nonna had picked a brown suit, a freshly ironed shirt, and clean socks from the closet and carried them over her arm as if Pop Pop had just slipped out, leaving his clothes behind. Gia shook the memory as she smoothed the dress on the bed, took the shoes from the bag, snipped tags on the costume Ray had bought for Lorraine.

  The shower ran and ran, thousands of pinpricks raining down like a meteor shower, emptying the thoughts in Lorraine’s head. The women in her family went to water for comfort.

  “Oh,” Lorraine said when she saw Gia on the window seat, the dress on the bed.

  Gia made to leave, embarrassed by the flushed skin above the towel. She could wait in the hallway, across the street, but Lorraine pushed the dress aside and sat down. Wrinkles! Gia panicked as Lorraine dipped a cotton ball into cream and made circles on her face. The dress looked like some exhausted person who’d flopped down on the mattress.

  “Maybe it won’t be so bad.” Ray’s words tumbled from her lips. The wrong ones. Lorraine’s hands moved in fast, nervous circles, making her skin shiny, though her mind was heavy underneath. Lorraine swallowed a lump in her throat, a muscle twitching at its base, betraying the expressionless look Gia interpreted as Whose side are you on? Silence. Gia stared out the window. Clothes and towels shuffled behind her. Had Lorraine ever been mad at her for more than a few minutes?

  But knowing someone your entire life meant there was nothing they could do that you wouldn’t get over, because there were too many memories intertwined to ever live without them.

  Lorraine zipped the dress by herself. It was black and smart with an Audrey Hepburn neckline. The shoes were black leather with a pointy toe, a leather sliver missing under the ankle. Everything fit just right, like the plastic shoes they used to slip on Barbie feet, the outfits they’d Velcro shut, smashing Barbie’s and Ken’s mouths together as their plastic eyes stared into one another’s. Lorraine ignored her. It was uncomfortable, but it was too awkward to leave, so Gia curled into herself.

  “Listen,” Lorraine said finally, fastening a thin chain with a single pearl around her neck. “Why don’t you stay here, and if I’m not home by midnight, tell your dad, OK?”

  Gia’s heartbeat flapped in her chest, worse than when she went over the handlebars, worse than the time her sled had flashed down the hill on the side of the highway and skidded under the metal divider, where a truck had smashed it to bits. Only once there was air in her lungs again, her chest pounding in her snowsuit, Lorraine and Leo tiny at the top of the hill, did she realize she’d jumped.

  “Why are you scared?” Gia didn’t want to know, just like she hadn’t watched as cars had swerved around the sled. It was easier to stare at the sky. To hear it smash outside herself.

  “Scared?” Lorraine’s voice was brittle. “I’m not scared, Gia. I’m just not stupid. If you really can’t figure it out, then I’m not going to explain it.”

  “But what if he’s right?” Gia blurted. “What if this is the only way for all of us?”

  The only adventure women ever had in movies was falling in love. It didn’t matter what they did before or after; it was just about meeting him. It never showed them sitting at the table with a checkbook afterward, arguing about whether the butcher overcharged them for a pound of pork chops or how much to put in the church collection envelopes. But that wouldn’t happen if they came up. They could live anywhere, go to Florida just because and have their own sticky pecan logs under palm trees, fill canals if they wanted, drive shiny cars and ride around in boats on Mondays, all week, read books all day and never need shorthand. What if he was right and this was how to do it?

  Lorraine lingered by the door. It was easy to forget she was only seventeen. She was so much like the movie stars with black dresses and clutch bags with shiny chains, sipping from cocktail glasses, slipping into glamorous yellow taxis, but Lorraine didn’t have a driver’s license or a high school diploma, couldn’t vote or buy cigarettes, didn’t have a father. Tonight, she looked more like a sleepy-eyed kid asking when her parents were coming home, needing to wake up with everything right again.

  “Just be glad it’s not you.”

  The door closed. What did that mean? Her shoes made a snapping sound on the steps like branches breaking on a bed of leaves until the quiet echoed. Gia didn’t want to touch anything. It was too private to be here alone.

  A dad should’ve walked Lorraine to the car or demanded that her date ring the bell. But Lorraine was already waiting in a circle of streetlight, rolling a pebble under her toe. Her head lifted when the car pulled up. She opened the door for herself and hesitated, turning back to look at her bedroom window, her face blank, just splashes of makeup for lips and eyes, before slipping inside. The door closed soundlessly. The car drove away. The whole thing felt final now, stamped in time.

  Gia couldn’t sit still, so she collected bottles and cans in a trash bag, tossed expired food from the fridge, scrubbed the counters, swept, washed the bathroom towels, wiped down the bathroom mirror until her face was uncomfortably vivid, swirled the toilet brush in the bowl. Only Lorraine would notice. Poor Lorraine. No one noticed when she cleaned. Or Agnes. Maybe Agnes didn’t even want to scrub toilets but was stuck with it. She felt a sudden appreciation for her mother, who never left moldy food in the fridge, who didn’t sit around like Aunt Diane.

  Nine o’clock. Maybe the bread basket had been cleared and their dinners were steaming and pretty—eggplant parmesan or fettucine Alfredo. Stuffed shells or lasagna.

  Aunt Diane shifted in the recliner. The TV volume lowered. Gia froze.

  “Lorraine! Lorraine!” she called out, then shifted again a
nd went quiet.

  Something in her voice made Gia panic, but it was too early. Lorraine had said midnight. Gia went back upstairs and flipped through one of the nursing books next to the bed, but there were too many drawings of people without skin, exposing the puzzle of guts inside. It unnerved her that the drawings had faces, oblivious to the fact that their insides were exposed.

  Diane called out again. This time, a sob caught in her throat, broke through Gia’s patience. She couldn’t take it. Diane had known when Lou was in trouble, and now she was crying for Lorraine. Something was wrong.

  She could call the restaurant. Make sure they were there. Only she didn’t know which one. She grabbed the phone book and dialed the fanciest first.

  The phone filled with plates and voices, music lost in restaurant rush. She asked for Lorraine, and the phones dropped noisily as one gum-cracking hostess after the next “looked” while Gia wrapped the phone cord around her wrist until the veins throbbed under her skin, which made her queasier than she already felt, as they all reported back that Lorraine wasn’t there.

  “Did you even look or just put the phone down for a cigarette?” she snapped at the last tight-pants, clicky-heels-wearing hostess, probably counting down the hours until she could pop a cap off a beer bottle and chain-smoke in a car going nowhere. It was infuriating.

  The hostess hung up. The silence echoed. It was time to tell Ray.

  The Jimmy Dean Show blared, but the living room was empty. Gia stared at the abandoned chair. It spooked her worse than she already was. She slammed the door and jumped down the steps.

  The houses were dark, even her own. Everyone was at the movies or bowling. The emptiness made her feel more alone. The canal was full. High tide. The temperature dropped, and the leaves turned over. Rain. She ran to Ray’s, holding her breath past the tree stump in Mr. Angliotti’s yard where the sparrows had fallen. It felt important to move fast.