“Keep your mouth shut,” she told him, pointing to the open window as a trickle of cool air circled the room. “No one needs to know our business.” Then she lit two cigarettes and passed one to Leo, who shut up and smoked in silence until Agnes slammed the window and waited downstairs at the kitchen table with the off-duty gun in her pocket again.
“Unlock him.” Agnes was at the door as soon as Eddie came in.
“Let me change, Agnes.” He sighed heavily, undoing his uniform. “And put some coffee on. I’m taking him for a ride.”
“Where?” Agnes lit another cigarette, struggling to snap the lighter into cooperating. “Where are you taking him?”
Eddie didn’t answer. He filled a glass of water and drank it. Then another. Agnes was all nerves. The newspaper thudded on the porch, and Agnes shot her hand into her pocket, pulled out the gun.
“Jesus.” Eddie snatched it, gave Agnes a look that stopped Gia cold, emptied the barrel.
“Take her with you,” Agnes challenged him. “Wherever you’re taking him, take her too. They both go, or he doesn’t.”
“Agnes.”
But Agnes was already filling the percolator with water, washing the thermos.
“I’ll go.” Gia sat up taller so both feet would touch the floor and she wouldn’t look as small as she felt. “I’ll help.”
Eddie sighed and looked at Gia for a long time before tucking the off duty into his waistband, the bullets in his pocket.
“Fine,” he said, taking the stairs slowly.
Agnes waited until he was at the top before turning to Gia.
“Watch,” she said. “Make sure he doesn’t hurt your brother.”
“But h—”
“He won’t do anything if you’re watching.”
Agnes poured milk into the thermos as the percolator bubbled. Upstairs, closets opened and closed to throw them off about the hiding spot, because he came down without the gun, towing Leo behind him. There was a reddish-purple mark on his wrist from the cuffs that wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t kept tugging at them. He always made things worse. But he looked thoroughly ragged, especially beside Eddie. Even without sleep and with twenty years between them, Eddie looked less gray than Leo. Less weathered.
“What the hell?” Leo protested.
“Get in the car.” Eddie grabbed the thermos, and Gia skittered off behind him, giving Agnes one last look.
In the car, Leo slumped in the front seat. Eddie nudged him. Told him to sit up like a man. Forced a few sips of coffee into his mouth, making Leo cough. Eddie wiped the thermos with his sleeve before sipping from the other side. Gia wondered if her father had the same low-grade disgust she felt toward Leo now that he wouldn’t even sip from the same container anymore.
The road was empty. The green lights clicked in such a way that Eddie barely had to slow for the reds before the lights turned and they flew on, all the way to Rockaway. Eddie made a left under the A train, though it wasn’t running. The tracks sat over them, dark and metallic, blocking a starless sky, making it impossible to imagine the ocean on one side of the peninsula, the bay on the other.
Eddie killed the lights and coasted to a stop, turned to Gia in the back seat.
“Wait here. And don’t open the doors. Not for nothing. If anyone bothers you, keep your hand on the horn, and I’ll come back.”
Watch. She couldn’t watch if she wasn’t going, but she didn’t want to get out of the car here. There were only a few sparse buildings with broken windows hiding behind overgrown grass. Trash skittered down the sidewalk and pooled at the curbs. In between, there were shapes that could’ve been trash bags or slumped people. She wanted to stay in the car with the disgusting pine tree and wait till it was over, but that wasn’t the deal. And another part of her imagined a face through the glass while she was in here alone, scrambling over the front seat for the horn to blare into the silence, waking up unseen things. She was sorry she’d come. It was brave in the kitchen, but here it was just stupid. When her father opened the car door, she opened hers too. He didn’t stop her, just pushed Leo along and told Gia to stay close.
Between buildings, cardboard boxes were draped with tarps. Upside-down buckets dotted the sidewalk. It smelled like piss, unwashed bodies. People lived in those boxes, Gia realized. One crawled out, shoeless, his feet so filthy and scarred that Gia wanted to vomit, but she pressed into her father’s side, his belt digging into her ribs, and hung on to the back of his shirt, as Eddie pushed Leo forward, away from him, closer to the boxes and the makeshift tents, on his own.
“Take a good look, Leo, ’cause this is where you’re heading.”
Leo wiggled his jaw. His hands opened and closed. Almost the same way he got ready to fight in the lot behind the rectory, though it didn’t look like there was much fight in him now, more like he wanted to run away from this place fast. Inside one of the boxes, a baby cried, and someone yelled for it to shut up. Gia pulled at her father’s shirt harder, rolling the fabric into a ball in her fist, because she didn’t want to see or hear any more, even as Eddie toed at the needles on the ground, at the bottle caps and debris.
“The rate you’re going, this is where you’re heading. If this is what you want, we’ll shake hands right now, and you can stay here. Speed the whole thing up and keep us out of it.”
Leo opened his mouth. Closed it. He was rigid now where he’d been loose limbed before.
“Because if you keep using, this is it. There’s kids younger than you in here, so don’t think you’re an exception because you’re fifteen and come from a nice family. Doesn’t matter, Leo, doesn’t matter. And don’t think you can control it, because you can’t. You’ll run out of second chances, and this’ll be it.”
Eddie nudged him forward. “Go ahead. That’s what you want, isn’t it? C’mon, Gia. Let’s let him think about it.”
Eddie turned for the car and put his arm around Gia, walking quickly, like he couldn’t wait to shake this place off, Leo at his heels.
“Watch where you step,” he said, looking at Gia’s thin Keds. He opened the door for her, and Gia was thankful for the seats, the familiar smell. Her mouth was so dry. She wished for just a little bit of water, though the thought of putting anything in her stomach was sickening.
“Not you.” Eddie turned to Leo. “We’re not done.”
She almost felt bad for him, but part of her was glad to see him twitch, to call his bluff and prove he wasn’t such a tough guy after all.
“Lay down,” Eddie said. “If anyone bothers you, hit the horn.”
He slammed the door and locked it. Gia peeked for long enough to see Eddie and Leo going deeper into the city of boxes, Eddie plowing forward while Leo followed close behind, but Eddie pushed him away. Stand on your own, he must’ve told him. Gia had a hard time pairing up the kid who wanted to go to Vietnam and blow things up with the one gravitating back toward their father. Gia tucked her head into her arms and closed her eyes, imagining her bed, the macramé owl on the wall, her poster of the World’s Fair that Eddie had taken them to, dragging them by their collars past the admissions line and setting them loose with a couple of bucks and instructions to meet back at the car by ten p.m. How had it changed from money at the World’s Fair for belgian waffles with whipped cream and strawberries to a walk through this place?
“I’ll stop,” Leo was saying outside the car. “I’ll quit it. I swear. Just . . .”
The pleading in his voice was terrible. Gia pressed her hands over her ears. If her father was really going to leave him here, she did not want to see. Her father’s voice was low and measured, and it made Leo’s rise. No more drugs and no more stealing. No more Ray or Tommy. He’d make new friends. Do his homework and go to school. Get that job he was supposed to. He would not even drink. Eventually, Eddie opened the car, and they both slipped back inside.
“Sit up,” Eddie said, and Leo slid into the right shape. There were tears on his face, and he was sniffling. She’d never seen her brothe
r scared, but this was it. Gia felt mildly amused that her father had broken him down, tactically, like a sting operation after months of planning when police finally stormed a card table on a regular night and the whole crime ring came down with it. Hadn’t he said that once? One of the few times he’d talked about work.
“I’ll be good,” Leo promised, again and again, convincing himself as much as Eddie as the sun broke over the subway tracks and the first train of the day rattled past with its headlights on, outshining the sun.
“We’ll see,” Eddie said. “If this gets the better of you, I promise there will not be a funeral. We’ll bury you in a pine box.”
And for the rest of the ride, everyone was silent.
By Sunday afternoon, everyone knew.
“Act like everything’s normal,” Agnes told Gia as she pressed change into her hand and sent her to the grocery store for eggs. “Don’t say anything.”
But it was clear in the way people stopped talking when Gia cut through the church crowd lingering on the sidewalk that something had changed. Or at the grocery store when the aisle cleared and Gia was alone with the milk and butter, the refrigeration of the shelves soaking through her clothes, or when Mrs. Salerno whispered something into Flora’s ear on the checkout line and sent her away before Gia could wait behind them. They were dirty now because of whatever Ray had set in motion on Friday night, so much so that the cashier waved Gia through without ringing up the eggs or Snickers bar. Gia threw the money down on the belt and stormed out, eating the Snickers bar in three angry bites.
Ray’s new ’64 Dodge Charger was the same color as a night sky, split down the middle with a white stripe. He pulled up as Eddie arranged tables on the lawn, as Aunt Ida opened the lid on her pistachio cake. Eddie gripped a folding chair tighter, looking off at Lorraine’s dark house instead of Ray’s new car.
The car was out of place on the block. It was too new, too perfectly waxed. Little kids wouldn’t hop in and out of the back seat for school or church. It wouldn’t carry groceries. It would drive real slow, revving at stoplights, hinting at how fast it could go if every cylinder fired. It made the promise of school and hard work for a good life laughable. It gave Gia the creeps.
Everyone stopped. Aunt Ida clapped her hands, smiling as big as the White Rock fairy if she’d just seen something unbelievable in her puddle, while Uncle Frank swung his arm over his head for everyone to follow, bellowing for the ladies to come see.
“Would you look at this?” Uncle Frank bent so close to the hood that his round face reflected back. “What a beauty.”
Ray’s arm dangled from the driver’s side, one eyebrow raised, absorbing the attention the same way little kids shouted for their parents to watch them cannonball.
Her father circled the car, noting the custom finishes. The Art of War and Republic were dog-eared on the leather back seat, meant to be noticed.
Ray looked at her through the side mirror, asking a silent question, but she couldn’t look at him. Even being near him betrayed Lorraine again. Was she watching from her window? Gia waited, prayed, for her father to do something. Her father, who chased perps up dark staircases, who tackled men twice his size to the ground and put them in cuffs, who ran into the places other people were scared to go but still brought home salted street pretzels and woke them up so they could eat them warm from paper bags in their beds. Her father, who’d seen Lorraine wading home that night. Gia tightened her grip on the handful of silverware she was holding. She would key this car, leave a thick gash in the new paint like the one he’d left on Lorraine.
Leo asked how fast it went, but he was off, dazed, his voice floating down from some other place. Gia looked away in disgust. Again? How could these people be family, any of them? She wanted to pick up Buster and press his warm body against her face just to feel his honest heartbeat, breathe in the good of him, but she was too angry.
“Everyone’ll see you coming,” Agnes said, but her voice was steel. She dried her hands on a shabby dish towel. Everyone should see him coming, was what she meant, and run. Gia buzzed, bracing for whatever came next. Finally.
Eddie snapped up from the other side of the car. He stared at Agnes, his hands in his pockets, inspecting every dirt particle and fabric fiber until it clicked. Silent words flew over the midnight roof between them.
“How’d you pay for this?” Eddie circled back. “Hard-earned clam-shucking money?”
The mood shifted. The new toy forgotten. Eddie was ready to pull Ray through the window, hold his head to the ground, and make him talk.
Ray’s eyes narrowed. Or maybe Gia only imagined it as he tipped his head to one side, pretending not to understand long enough for Uncle Frank to save the day.
“Hey.” Uncle Frank crossed his arms over his stomach, squishing the fat against the organs inside, making Gia sick. “What are you implying?”
“It’s a question,” Eddie asked.
“What kind of a question?” Uncle Frank’s face reddened. “You’re saying no son of a garbageman could ever make good on a car like this, is that it? You want brass tacks? Maybe the paper trail would be proof for Mr. Officer that everything’s above the table?” He pointed a finger at his son. “He earned it. Fair.”
“Why don’t you ask Lorraine?” Agnes flung the dish towel into the dirt. “Ask her about Ray’s ‘good, honest work.’”
But Agnes might as well be a mosquito buzzing in the distance to Uncle Frank.
Aunt Ida stepped closer to Uncle Frank, but she was watching her sister, pressing her fingers to her lip, confusion playing over her face. Gia almost felt sorry for her.
The tarps on the new houses flapped angrily in the distance. Ray had gone silent. Leo slunk back to the sidewalk, stared at the sky, where a plane passed, rattling everything on the ground. The air was thick with everything no one said.
“Agnes,” Aunt Ida begged. But Agnes stared at the ground, where tears were falling softly into the dark earth. They used to cut earthworms in half, Gia remembered suddenly, with sticks, collecting the pile on the ground and watching them wriggle. “Do you think they’d know each other,” Leo once asked of the two separate pieces of the same worm, “if they saw each other again?”
Just like Agnes and Aunt Diane and Aunt Ida used to hang laundry on the roof of the Lower East Side, sleeping up there on nights it was too hot, praying for rain to splash down and break the heat, or opened fresh bars of soap on Christmas Day and tucked them in drawers to scent the clothes they shared while Nonna cooked on the woodstove. Now they had their own homes, their own kids, the language of their childhood forgotten except for the memories they’d rewritten and shared with their children, whether they were true or not.
Lorraine’s front door opened. Aunt Diane hobbled onto the porch, her housedress grotesque in the sun. Had she sensed the break between them the same way she’d dreamed the night Lou had fallen from the sky? The same way she’d known something was wrong with Lorraine?
Eddie whirled on Ray. “You want to fool them? Fool them. They don’t deserve it. Stay away from my children. Stay away from Lorraine. You’ll live with what you did for the rest of your life.”
Ray stared straight ahead. He could have pressed down on the gas and revved that magnificent engine, leaving them in the dust, but he’d hollowed out like a cicada shell clinging to bark, the real him somewhere else, and Gia was disgusted with the mute thing he’d become. She scratched the handful of utensils across the car hard enough to leave a long gash, but silently enough for no one to notice. It was satisfying, but not enough. She wanted to hurt him worse.
“Ida, get your things.” Uncle Frank directed his wife toward the house before turning toward Eddie. “Keep your smut to yourself. Go on.” He tapped the roof of the car. Ray drove away, and Uncle Frank shoved off to his shabby convertible. At least Tommy had the sense not to show up today.
“Worry about your own,” Frank threw over his shoulder, the smugness in his voice an arrow landing on Leo at the curb, who’d
folded in half, dangling like a rag doll.
But Eddie stared him down, holding his ground. “You should ask more questions before your kids end up in cement shoes.”
Aunt Ida hesitated, looking between Frank and Agnes before slipping into the car and driving down the block.
“Get him off the damn lawn,” Eddie hissed, his back to Leo, putting a wall between them, before turning toward the house and slamming the door.
Aunt Diane and Agnes looked at each other for a very long time without speaking.
Without being asked, Gia folded the tables, carried the cake inside. It unnerved her that Aunt Diane was still outside, staring. She could not remember a time Aunt Diane had ever spoken to her. The dish towel was still curled on the lawn as Agnes prodded Leo toward the house. She couldn’t think with Aunt Diane leaning on the porch railing like that, looking right through her at everything Gia had failed to do.
By Wednesday, nothing had happened.
“We should talk to them,” Agnes said over coffee, over dinner, on the porch at night with a cigarette burning, so often that Gia wished Agnes would just put her shoes on and go. Eddie didn’t stop her. He just said nothing, which was exactly, Gia figured, what talking to them would change.
Lorraine did not go to school or leave her house, which was maybe better because Gia didn’t know what to say to her. Or what to do. The only thing she could think of was covering Lorraine’s shifts at the bakery until she was ready to go back.
“Again?” Big Louis said when Gia came in. He was huffing like a truck without a muffler as the fan ruffled papers on his desk, but he must’ve felt sorry later, because he came back with a box of warm S cookies for Lorraine. “Settles the stomach,” he said. “With a glass of milk.” There was a five-dollar bill taped to the bottom of the box. That was one nice thing about being the boss, handing out however much money you wanted.
A Frenzy of Sparks: A Novel Page 12
