That week, Gia slid her hand between the mattress and the box spring to put her bakery money with the rest of the folded bills, including Ray’s, but it was only smooth and cool. She lifted the mattress, but there was only the thin lining. She checked under the bed in case it had fluttered away, knowing it was gone. And it had to be Leo. And she felt sick, wondering if he’d taken it all at once or in little bits, knowing she wouldn’t notice either way or didn’t care. It was almost a relief not to worry over what to use it for that was worth what she’d done to get it in the first place. She could start over, and her honest money wouldn’t mix with Ray’s, but the shock of it surprised her, stinging through her skin and up her spine like a man-of-war in the ocean, her stupidity for not seeing it coming squeezing at her chest until it was hard to breathe and all she could do was curl up on the slanted mattress and promise not to let it happen again.
The secret of her brother made Gia painfully careful of everything. It made the whole world look different—house numbers were suddenly important, the call of crows cut through street noise, and subtle smells like shampoo or soap as people passed on the sidewalk were sharp in Gia’s nose—because she was always ready, even if the purpose was unclear.
It was exhausting to be on alert all the time. At school, she put her head down on her desk and asked for passes to the nurse just to lie down for a little while. Ten minutes of sleep on the nurse’s cot was more than she got at home, where every creak in the hallway sparked her awake. Sometimes she skipped gym and slept on the exercise mats piled in the locker room. They were greasy and stamped with shoe prints but far from anywhere Leo was. The nurse sent a note home recommending a test for mono, but they all knew it wasn’t the kissing disease. That note ended up in the trash.
And word got around. Big Louis at the bakery took Gia off the register.
“Bag it up and give it to Regina to ring in,” he huffed on his way down the basement steps one day, hauling a bag of flour that leaked from the seams, clouding his face, and Gia knew why. It didn’t matter how honest she was or that she’d never stolen or done drugs herself, because it was in her blood, same as Leo, and it could pop out at any time. She wondered, too, if Big Louis was right, and it haunted her that they might be the same, she and Leo, the same way they hated escarole or raisins in braciola or had slightly webbed toes. If it could run in Gia like it ran in Leo, all she needed were the right things to unlock it.
So Gia turned down aspirin for headaches and Alka-Seltzer for her stomach, because they were chemicals. She didn’t know where the line was anymore.
Her parents whispered about options at the kitchen table and a plan starting “soon”: cold turkey, halfway houses, a trip, a place called Brother Island. That meant a lot of brothers needed sending off, which gave Gia a guilty relief that they were not the only ones. Brother Island was closed forever, her father said, because locking people up and making them quit didn’t work. There were other places and programs.
But he should be home, Agnes argued. They would fix this themselves.
“What’s the difference?” he asked Agnes one night. “If he’s locked up either way?”
But there it would just happen, whatever it was, and they’d see Leo when it was over. Here, it would be two doors down from her room, without doctors or nurses or hospital things. He would be away like all the contaminated sunflower fields and orange groves in her book had been. Not here. This was too big for an eighth grader, like the sparrows falling from the tree.
“Stop comparing him to the kids you see on the street,” Agnes snapped, pausing to finish the rest of the amaretto in her glass, an old bottle that could’ve been Nonna and Pop Pop’s, a gift forgotten in the hutch, dusted off and poured into a glass with ice. “You can’t write off your own son.”
The clock ticked between them. Eddie lit a cigarette but didn’t smoke it. It sat in the ashtray, burning. Agnes took another sip from the empty glass.
“What if we just gave him little amounts at a time? Control how much he takes?”
Eddie slammed a fist down and stormed out the front door in a huff with a new pack of smokes, Leo’s cue the kitchen was safe.
“I need money,” he said as Gia swiped a butter knife of peanut butter over toast.
“For what?” Agnes refilled the glass as an ice cube melted on the table.
“Don’t give him money,” Gia snapped, remembering those kids under the train tracks and their burning trash, unwashed bodies, and soggy clothes.
“Shut up,” Leo snapped back. “Shut the hell up.”
“Hey!” Agnes stood, rattling the Tiffany lamp above the table so the dust shook free. “Watch your mouth.”
But Gia’d had it. The butter knife flew, hit him in his sweat-stained T-shirt, leaving a smear of peanut butter. Gia braced as Leo charged forward until Agnes jumped between them.
“Enough! Enough! Here . . .” She unfolded a five-dollar bill from her purse. Leo glared at the crumpled bill, clearly disappointed, before storming out.
“Not a word.” Agnes rubbed her forehead. “Just be glad he won’t steal it from you later.”
But he couldn’t. Not when her bakery money was in a Maxwell House can in Lorraine’s kitchen cupboard, all the way in the back. She wasn’t that stupid anymore. Even if Agnes was.
Gia stormed out, too, forgetting about her peanut butter toast, and headed for the dock. October had emptied the boats from the canal. Barnacles had already been scraped from the hulls, motors winterized, boats packaged under snow-proof tarps. There was nothing sadder than a boat out of water, the stillness of it, eerie in the same way Nonna had been at her wake, when Gia had been convinced she was still breathing. Their boat was one of the forgotten few still bobbing in the water.
They weren’t doing enough. Even Gia could see that, and she was only thirteen. They were thinking like adults, running over the same ideas old people always did. Timothy Leary was wrong about LSD, but he wasn’t wrong about people opening their minds. Maybe it was like the person who’d invented the felt tip pen or the time Leo had added the Möbius strip to the lawn mower. One small change could make all the difference. Gia stared at the sky, where the constellations were changing with the seasons, knowing her brother was sinking. Let him sink, she thought bitterly, but no. Her mother was right. He was still in there somewhere. And he didn’t deserve that place under the train or being buried in a pine box, no matter what her father threatened.
Brother Island was a kidney-shaped splotch on a nautical map of the Hudson. Too far to swim to the Bronx or Queens. Without a boat, you’d be Gilligan’s Island stuck. The encyclopedia said it had been a hospital for smallpox and tuberculosis once, a swamp of trapped germs. It was disgusting, all that death and sick gobbled up by water lapping at the shore.
“Dad?” she asked one night, slicing a cucumber at the counter while her mother washed lettuce in the sink. “What happens at Brother Island now that it’s abandoned?”
“Crime,” he said without looking up from the Aqueduct race scores.
“How do you know about that place?” Agnes left the water running in the sink, her hands in the lettuce, looking like she’d hopped off a merry-go-round too fast.
“Heard you talking about it.” Gia shrugged, knowing her mother was wondering what else Gia had heard. Agnes snapped the water off and dried her hands with a dish towel that left little fibers on her skin.
“But why?” Gia tried to sound casual, kept chopping. A cucumber slice rolled off the cutting board and dropped to the floor.
“Because people do whatever they want when no one’s watching.”
“But not everyone.” Gia searched for the right words. Her father understood crime. Were the two so different, crime and drugs, when they were both illegal? Why Leo and not her? “Some people make the right choice even if there’s a bad option.”
“Some,” he said, but the optimism fell flat. Some people won the lottery. Some people were rich. Some people went to college.
�
�Well, with the island, why did it work for some people and not others?”
“’Cause.” Her father rubbed his eyes. “You can take the junk away, but the need for it sticks. The second they get off that island, they go right back to it.”
The old stories about her father clicked together: Chin-ups off the fire escapes on the Lower East Side to bulk up before the draft, faking his papers to enlist before he was old enough, lining up next to a high school pool for the sink-or-float test. Later, he’d been a navy machine gunner, even though he hadn’t finished eighth grade, but people listened to him anyway. He had a habit of picking things up around the house—a wire hanger, an empty bottle—and saying things like, Someone could get hurt on this. His quiet calm made people like Uncle Frank nervous because he didn’t air his thoughts all over the place, but he was missing the point.
“Why would it work here versus Brother Island if the need sticks?”
The question hung in the kitchen like cigarette smoke around a light, clouding the plan.
“Your brother has an obligation to do right by us,” Agnes snapped. “None of the boys on that island had any reason to get better. Why should they if their families abandoned them?”
The last sentence cut through the haze of Gia’s question.
“But there were doctors and scientists,” Gia argued. “And they couldn’t—”
“It’s different.” Agnes gathered the floating lettuce into a bowl, splashing water all over the counter.
If scientists sent things into space and built submarines and bombs, how could they fail a bunch of boys on an island? Gia opened her mouth, but her father shook his head. Drop it.
Dinner was silent, the table set for Leo even though he wasn’t there. Her father ate only a handful of bites before gathering his keys and a thermos of hot water with lemon.
“I’m gonna take a ride,” he said. “See if I can find him.”
Agnes let out a breath, the relief clear. She’d been waiting for Eddie to suggest this all night. Gia cleared plates and scraped the uneaten food into the trash while her mother stared at Leo’s empty seat, his clean plate, holding an invisible conversation.
“Leave it,” Agnes said as Gia cleared Leo’s place. “He’ll eat when he gets home.”
Gia bit back the words on the tip of her tongue: that he did not care about chicken and mashed potatoes or eating with his family or school or even motorcycles or anything unless it could be snorted, smoked, or injected. She left her mother in the kitchen with a glass of water sweating a river over the edge of the table.
That night, Gia lay awake. Maybe quitting cold turkey would work; maybe not. She traced the shape of Brother Island in her mind. A kidney, like a Florida pool or a bean. The hospital on Brother Island was a big stone thing. Maybe any hidden place would work. Slowly other shapes formed in her mind like smudges on a warming car window. Pumpkin Patch. West Marsh. Salt. Garbage barges dumped in the bay because trash washed out to sea. The marsh was an in-between place for fresh water and salt, absorbing storms, filtering pollution.
They were wrong, Gia realized, the doctors, nurses, scientists, her parents—because at the stone hospital on Brother Island or his bedroom, he would have everything he needed to survive, just not the drugs. He would crave what he couldn’t have, but without food, water, and shelter, maybe the missing part wouldn’t seem as important and the marsh could work its magic. It was closer to the edge Leo lived on.
At some point that night, her father came home and closed the door quietly behind him, but there was only one set of shoes on the stairs in the morning.
But at breakfast, her mother let out a small cry in the kitchen because Nonna’s silverware was gone, every last teaspoon with curved roses. Gia felt sorry for Agnes, who’d polished and set it out on holidays like Nonna had. Now it had been stolen by someone who should’ve inherited it and set it on his family table one day. Agnes closed the cabinet door and went to work, walking the long way toward the train to avoid Aunt Ida’s house.
“I will fix this,” Gia promised everyone, veering off on her way to school and doubling back for the house. Leo was right about nothing being important at school anymore, not when everything was falling apart. She would make her own Brother Island. She would make him fight to be alive where there was no silverware to steal or drugs to change his brain. Where there was no one left to hurt but himself.
First, she needed a place.
Second: the boat needed to be empty, like always, so Leo wouldn’t suspect, which meant she’d have to take the boat out alone. The thought gave her a fluttery feeling not unlike what she imagined girls felt when some boy asked them out and they stood in a gaggle flapping with excitement.
And she’d have to get Leo in the boat. Her parents would need an explanation without enough information to ruin everything. She would figure that out later, but for the next few days, Gia slipped things away unnoticed—saltine packets, canteens of water, flashlights, clothes, the old camping gear from the garage—while her parents prepared for their own experiment. She stashed everything in the boat, a little at a time.
He’d have everything he needed at first; then she’d cut back. The more he lived without, the more he’d fight to live.
It was during one of her trips from the grocery store to the boat, transporting chips and Moon Pies, that she realized she’d missed the dance. Her mother hadn’t noticed the circle on the calendar as she’d folded clean towels and carried them to the linen closet, nor had her father as he’d pulled Leo’s furniture from the wall and felt the edges for hiding spots.
The neighborhood felt like Halloween: costumes and makeup, flashes of taffeta sparkling in the early-evening light, Flora Salerno posing in front of the rhododendron bush for her mother’s Kodak with some poor schlub in a suit. It was only when Gia rounded the corner that she realized the boy in the navy suit and neatly combed hair slipping a corsage of pink tea roses onto Flora’s thin wrist was Tommy.
And yet she had passed right by, unnoticed, as invisible as a gnat, barely recognizing someone she’d opened presents with on Christmas morning for as long as she could remember, sat side by side with at midnight Mass, dipping their fingers in wax melting from slender candles and drawing like with crayons on the back of the pew. He’d once given her a rock for her birthday because it looked like a dolphin—did she see? The tail here, the fin here, a long pointed nose. And she had seen. It was in her room somewhere, along with the cotton candy they’d tried to save but forgotten about until they’d found it months later, pink and crystallized into a kind of fascinating coral. But they were unstuck now, and it was hard to believe it could happen so fast, that it could happen at all.
Gia rolled the grocery bag into the others. There was still sun in the sky, enough for a few hours. She couldn’t go home, not when everyone in the world, even Tommy, was at the dance, couldn’t go home and accept she’d become invisible. Her throat squeezed at the memory of Lorraine pushing back the coffee table, how easily she’d laughed then, how pretty she was with her long dark hair around her face. Now she was a shadow of her other self. Slowly, Gia uncleated the ropes, nudged her shoes between the supplies at the bottom of the boat, lowered the outboard, and motored off into the great big welcoming bay, laughing at Tommy dressed in his penguin suit and the thought of him dancing with stupid bug-eyed Flora while nuns measured the distance between them with rulers. Salt spray sparkled in Gia’s hair, her own galaxy of stars, the boat rising and falling out of tune with Gia’s breath, crashing her teeth into each other. She was a flying fish, jumping waves and changing direction, water soaking her clothes. She wasn’t forgotten or out of place here. She was Gia. G-I-A. Three proud letters just like three proud elements: water, air, and fire. She was all three, born again on the water in a wild world of marshes.
And there it was: her island. It was just right for a tent, for the experiment that would save her brother, her parents. She killed the engine and tugged the boat forward, knowing she’d find it again as
she had tonight, because the marsh would lead her right to it, whisper her closer and call her home as many times as it took.
That night, Leo stole meat from the supermarket and got caught on the way out. He slugged the store manager and left him with a black eye and a broken rib. Eddie was on tour, but he came straight home in his cruiser, lights and sirens blaring, threw Leo in the slammer for the night a few precincts over, and came home with the hundred dollars of frozen meat Leo had stuffed under his shirt and a receipt that made Agnes cringe.
“Paid in full.” Eddie sighed. “Party’s over.”
The preparation was quick: Eddie nailed fabric to the windows in Leo’s room to block the light; Leo’s stash was flushed, minus the little bits Agnes kept to dole out later if need be; they equipped the room with clean towels, an ice bucket, a washcloth, a chair for sitting watch, and a pitcher of water sweating on the nightstand; and Eddie took a quick nap before getting ready to pick Leo up again at the station. It was so hospital-like that Gia was thankful to snatch her things and head out.
“Dad?” Gia asked as Eddie pulled back Leo’s bed and ran his hand under the headboard before doing the same to the dresser and Leo’s desk. “What happens exactly?”
“What happens with what?”
“With whatever you’re doing tonight.”
Eddie paused and sat on the floor. “Remember when you got the flu a year or two ago? It’s like that, but worse. The worst flu you could ever get.”
Gia sat beside him, resisting the urge to put her head on his shoulder because she was too old for that baby stuff now, and he was busy. She only had a few minutes at most before he started working again.
A Frenzy of Sparks: A Novel Page 14
