No wonder Aunt Ida and Uncle Frank, even Ray and Tommy, looked down on them. Even Uncle Frank’s cast-off trash things were nicer than anything in their house. The only reason they’d come here was to save them from having Gia’s family in their house, where they’d junk up the nice furniture, the rugs. She had done that once, hadn’t she? With one of Aunt Ida’s crystal wineglasses, a wedding gift. She’d filled it with grape juice, pretending it was wine, and put an olive on a plastic cocktail sword, too, then dropped the whole thing when she’d screamed “Happy New Year!”
Leo had killed her in the marsh, left her for dead. It didn’t matter if he’d planned it or not. The point was, she’d been disposable, like the rest of her family, sent to America to work, sent to the South Pacific to fight, sent to burning Brooklyn, left on a marsh. She stared at her house with the sagging porch and the leaking roof and thought of the girl named Gia who used to live here once, with a brother and two parents, two grandparents. Then she thought of the man in the tarp, dropped over the side of the boat, sunk to the bottom of the shallow bay. They were the same, him and her, rolled up and thrown away, a tarp thrown over her sun, her sky, the world an empty black, a watery quiet.
The front door flew open, and her mother rushed down the walkway, calling her name.
Gia’s face pressed into her mother’s stomach, where she’d come from, carried for months until she was ready. Her mother was crying. Tears landed on Gia’s shoulders in warm splashes. She touched one to make sure it was real, too numb to know for sure.
Her mother led her by the hand into the house.
There was noise. Lorraine came from the living room. Aunt Diane too. Her father in the kitchen doorway, pulling at her arms and legs, bending her head forward and back, digging through her hair to inspect her scalp. There was a new lock on the front door, gold and brassy, the kind bought from a dusty shelf at the hardware store, the same color as a king’s crown. Her father carried her up the stairs, set her down on the bathroom floor, then fell to the background as the women rushed in. Her mother closed the door, started the shower water, peeled away her clothes, and dropped them on the floor, pausing at the mark on her back before helping Gia step into the shower. Lorraine and Agnes circled her with soap, washing her hair. Neither caring that water splashed them, too, leaving wet marks on their clothes. There was a towel, a hairbrush, a braid, a clean nightgown over her head, the bed she’d imagined on the island, her feet leaving wet puddles on the floor.
Her mother didn’t leave. She kissed her forehead and whispered prayers. Gia closed her eyes. It wasn’t that she saw the body falling over the side of the boat; it was that the water fogged her ears and her vision went dark, flashes of light catching through the tarp weave as she was cocooned in plastic, water weighing above and below her small body. She was only thirteen. She saw that now, how little the number thirteen really was. She could count it in her father’s pacing steps outside the door, one to thirteen again and again. At some point, she dropped off and sank like the body had, into an endless black.
For days, Gia did not speak. Food arrived on a tray: buttered toast, plain noodles, chicken soup, mugs of tea getting colder by the hour. Agnes pressed her hand to Gia’s forehead, but it was always cool. There was nothing wrong that chicken soup could fix, just like there wasn’t a cure for closing her eyes, sinking through water, and settling on a soft, sandy bottom. The idea was stuck there, rippling through her thoughts whenever a shadow passed over the sun, in the early morning before it was light out, as the light went away. It was there when Agnes ran a bath and the water sat in the tub, in the hum of a mosquito that had slipped through the screen.
She snatched at mosquitoes, real and imaginary, squashing them in her hand, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing to stop that terrible hum, brushing the dead dust away on her comforter, surprised to feel soft cotton instead of sand. But as everyone orbited her, all she wanted was to be alone, as alone as she’d been on the marsh. She didn’t deserve Agnes’s rosaries or her father opening the windows or his shadow in the doorway at night, standing guard, or Lorraine slipping in after school, whispering stories about a boy who opened his mouth and swallowed the universe, washed it clean, while a dried plant in a bowl burned near the window. She hid a pink crystal in the sheets by Gia’s feet and promised it was for healing, listened to her heart with her nursing stethoscope, but Gia said nothing. Her silence became something they tiptoed past.
On the third or fourth day, her father carried a chair into her room, plunked it down hard enough to wake her. She hadn’t known she’d been asleep. She’d been dreaming about the chickens they used to keep in the yard, how she’d sprinkle bread crumbs through the mesh and they’d peck at it, digging through the dirt to scrape up more, how they’d still run after their heads had been cut off, how Leo, Ray, and Tommy had poked at the back of the headless chicken, waking some bone-deep instinct to move until it flopped over. That had happened in real life, Gia realized as she blinked her room into focus, and she forced away nausea at the cruelty of it, at their fingers raking through red-orange feathers, prodding it forward.
It was bright outside. A perfect sun. It caught the stray gray hairs on her father’s head, the same color as fishing line. Gia couldn’t look at him or near him. There was too much she didn’t want him to see.
“You’re probably wondering where your brother is.” He sighed. Gia pressed her eyes shut because she was not wondering where Leo was and didn’t care what kind of stinking, wasted place he’d slithered off to.
“I brought him to a halfway house in Brooklyn because he can’t live here anymore. I don’t know what he did. I don’t care why . . .” But his voice cut out, his face twisted so that all the features scrunched toward each other. He put his head in his hands, animal sounds escaping from the hollow space. His back heaved, and his heels ground into the floor, broken for her. It should’ve moved her, but she only felt impatient, annoyed he was intruding on her silence, talking about Leo.
“He’s not coming back. Not until he’s fixed. And I hope that brings you a little peace.”
The hope in his voice disgusted her. He was not the fixer of everything. How could he be with only eight years of school, most of which involved nothing but counting and tracing letters? She wasn’t being fair, but that water was in her lungs, that empty sky, all that darkness. There was no room for anything else, not words. Not sympathy.
And what was a halfway house? Leo wasn’t halfway to anything. Definitely not halfway to better. No one who left his sister for dead and stole her boat just to get a fix was halfway to anything good. Couldn’t he see that? Why couldn’t he see it the same way she did? Maybe because Leo hadn’t tried to kill him yet.
He stood up as if there were some urgency, clearing out before he’d given Gia a chance to speak because it would hurt less when she didn’t, but he paused by the door with the chair in his hand.
“You’re a good soldier,” he said.
Alone again, she thought of one of the orange-peel boats she’d launched from her porch to Lorraine’s on tidewater with one of Leo’s little green army men inside. It had floated for a bit, drifting down the street past a fallen stop sign with two points of its octagon sticking out above the water. It never made it to Lorraine’s house, but there was only so much you could expect from newspaper sails on orange-peel boats.
Chapter Fourteen
Gia didn’t go to school. No one asked her to. She slept whenever she felt like it, took stray bites of food here and there, and left the plates unwashed. She peeled back a curl of wallpaper from beneath her light switch in one long ribbon, exposing the yellowed glue underneath.
When her parents went to work, she walked to the canal and sat on the empty dock. The rope was still coiled, waiting for the boat to come back. She remembered having a dog once when she was very young that must’ve run away; for months the leash had hung by the door. She was not mad at the bay. She felt sorry for it, forced to swallow that person, forced to keep a secret; sh
e felt sorry that something so terrible could happen to a place that was meant to be good: a resting place for migrating birds, a breeding ground for horseshoe crabs and oysters and mussels, a place that absorbed storms and teemed with life. Yes, it knew death, but not like this. She pulled her knees to her chest as water rippled past with a sadness Gia hadn’t noticed before. How many others were there? How many other terrible secrets was the bay keeping?
The halfway house lasted for four days. “What do you mean, he’s not there?” Agnes shouted into the phone before dropping her voice. The thermos she’d been rinsing in the sink overflowed, and then there was a flurry of phone calls—to her father at the station, to local hospitals, to her father again—until Gia got bored with it. That was the nice thing about being a ghost: it made everything that would have hurt duller.
That night, her father took the doorknob off her door and popped a new one into place that locked from the inside, gave her a key on a loop of twine. So much for Leo not coming home. He ignored the wallpaper on the floor.
Otherwise, no one talked about it, at least not to Gia. But there was more food in the refrigerator than usual. New locks on the doors. Fresh sheets on Leo’s bed. A fourth towel hanging in the bathroom. A new toothbrush. A heavy safe with feet drilled into the closet floor in her parents’ bedroom, as if her parents didn’t agree about where their son belonged. Agnes, Gia suspected, was still leaving milk out on the porch for her son, the stray, while her father built a fort. And he was doing something else too.
Gia sat on the porch next to the rabbit hutch and watched people come and go. Her father was doing something inside one of the new houses; she was sure of it. They had windows and doors now, siding and shingles, gutters. The lawns were full of dirt, bundles of drywall under tarps, buckets of Spackle. Soon they would have walls. She saw him in his uniform through an open door, talking to someone inside, looking over his shoulder to sweep the neighborhood. And why was he in uniform? The questions were surprising, seeping in through cracks in the numbness.
That was yesterday, and it had sat wrong all night.
Today, Mr. Angliotti moved boxes to the curb for trash pickup, cleaning out the basement in the same navy trousers and moth-eaten plaid shirt he always wore. “Can’t take it with you,” he’d said, shrugging, that morning as Gia had walked to the canal, the hose battering the rosebushes. He was a ghost, too, living a shadow of his former life like she was.
Trip after trip, craning over each box before taking the next step, bending slowly to line boxes on the curb. It was painful to watch. Irritating, almost. He stopped to wipe sweat from his brow, and Gia’s mouth smarted with the memory of salt water up her nose and on her lips, of sand scraping her scalp and sand fleas bouncing near her face, of Leo’s disgusting clothes on her skin.
Gia’s arms and legs were awake now, pulling her down the street. She was too restless to sit still. Helping an old man move junk to the curb was something the other Gia would’ve done, something she could help with without making worse.
She met Mr. Angliotti on the curb. Sweat beaded on his forehead, above his lip. His face was bright pink, his shirt damp under the arms. She reached for the box.
Mr. Angliotti eyed her through a milky cataract. Gia’s heartbeat quickened defensively. Yes, the rumors about Leo were true, but she was still good, wasn’t she? Or was she guilty by association? She was willing to just accept it and go home. What was the point of trying to prove otherwise? Mr. Angliotti hesitated. She’d been in his house dozens of times to babysit his grandkids, had brought her old toys over for them. Gia’s disgust for her brother intensified.
“Well, OK.” Mr. Angliotti ran his hand over a wisp of hair on his bald, sunspotted head and handed her the box. “Everything’s in the hallway. Just get ’em to the curb. Take whatever you want. I don’t need it anymore.” Mr. Angliotti sighed. “Everything changes . . .”
She couldn’t listen to him grumble about how good the world used to be. Not today.
Framed pictures of Mr. Angliotti’s grandkids smiled down at her. There was a mirror next to the hallway coat tree, a new color TV in Mr. Angliotti’s living room. War medals. Trinket boxes. A carved wooden clock. What had the man in the water left behind?
She made trip after trip, sweating through her shirt, her muscles burning, especially the sore spot on her back where he’d hit her with that stick, but Gia didn’t care. She imagined the things in her room being packed into boxes: her macramé owl, her poster of the World’s Fair, her seashells, the chain of egg cases from a thorny skate, the new tubes of makeup. The key to her room hung around her neck, warming to her skin, as she passed the tree stump where the sparrows had fallen again and again. Only she didn’t hold her breath. It seemed silly now.
Mr. Angliotti offered her cookies from a tin when she was done, admiring the empty hallway as Gia swept the dust. It was amazing how unnecessary speaking was, how people didn’t even notice.
“Come back tomorrow. I’ll pay you.”
But Gia shook her head. She didn’t want money. Not ever again. And she wouldn’t come back. Mr. Angliotti’s door closed behind him. The lock clicked into place. Did he always lock it, or was it because of her? She imagined him watching through the peephole just to make sure she was gone, like the trash heaps along the Cross Island Parkway, capped with fresh soil and clean grass but filthy and contaminated underneath the hills that disguised the garbage.
On Saturday, every light was on at Our Lady of Grace. Five o’clock Mass had finished, and everyone filed down to the church basement, where canned goods were stacked on folding tables, waiting to be sorted and loaded into vans for soup kitchens for Thanksgiving. A bag full of canned peas cut into Gia’s wrist, leaving a throbbing welt. Vegetables were in the far right corner, fruit on the left, everything else at the front, but Gia was not looking for the right table. She was looking for her brother.
Because someone had rummaged through the boxes on Mr. Angliotti’s curb earlier that morning and thrown a bunch of stuff into the street before garbage collection had come. And someone had picked at the new lock on the front door with a sharp object while Gia was at the doctor until they’d given up and broken the window, reached through to open the front door, taken the money from the grocery jar in the kitchen, and kicked down the door to Gia’s room for the money she used to keep under her mattress.
“Should we call the police?” Agnes had asked as she’d swept the broken glass into the dustpan, and Gia had almost broken her silent streak to ask if she was an idiot.
That morning, before Leo had broken into the house, Eddie had turned down Gia’s quilt to kiss her cheek and tell her he loved her, as Gia had pretended to sleep. Later, Agnes had taken Gia to the doctor, a pediatrician, who’d looked in her ears and mouth, up her nose, asked if she’d had her first menstruation yet, an idea that made Gia queasy as he pressed on her stomach for organs. Her mother explained that Gia had not spoken since the “incident” while Gia stared at a small smudge on the ceiling that could’ve been a squashed bug or a curl of cigarette smoke or a splash of blood, working out how long it would be before she could sleep again while the doctor whispered about shell shock, silence, nightmares, coming out of it eventually. Wrong, wrong, wrong, Gia thought as Agnes nodded along. Silence was not a choice. It was all that was left.
Until she’d seen the front door swinging, her mattress thrown aside, the trail of him fresh. Now, her whole house felt contaminated the same way the bay did with a body floating under the surface. She could not curl up in her bed and listen to the house hum anymore because his presence cut through the silence and made it hum with hate. She was not looking for him as she pushed through the church doors; she was hunting. She wanted to stand in front of him so he’d know that she—Gia—was alive despite him, that she’d saved herself in the marsh after he’d left her for dead, and wasn’t that something? She’d made it. Then she’d never speak to or think about him again. She was old stock too.
Everyone was here. Her
mother, Aunt Ida, Mr. Angliotti, the nuns. All but Lorraine, who was probably at the house with the pillows. Her mother had even dressed up in her favorite black dress, her face circled by short curls, sorting cans mostly alone. The women from her card club popped over to say hello before moseying off to Aunt Ida’s table on the other side of the room, her mother a citronella flame to their spindly wings, as little kids spun cans on the floor.
Gia skirted the room, sidestepping conversations, searching for her brother and thinking about how ridiculous this was. Only humans were stupid enough to feed animals that could not feed themselves.
Upstairs, people set up poinsettias and pine garlands at the altar. The air was cold, heavy with high tide. Gia walked the first few blocks home, jogged the last. The houses were dark except for Ray and Tommy’s, where the lights were on and Ray’s car was in the driveway with Antonio’s behind it, blocking part of the sidewalk, acting like it belonged there when it really didn’t. Cars pulled up to the curb, and kids hopped out in their best jeans and fringe jackets, walking all over the front lawn, Tommy ushering them inside. He’d thinned out, grown a little, his face less Gerber Babyish but still not manly. So they were having a party. How nice.
She sat on the porch. Across the swimming canal, construction materials had been cleared from the patchy lawns, the windows and doors installed and locked. They had new aluminum siding and clean gutters with drainpipes to let water race down dirt lawns to the canal. They would be lived in by Christmas. The more finished they got, the more final it seemed that her swimming canal would go away, but Gia didn’t care anymore now that she’d never swim with Lorraine again, or even Ray and Tommy, or Leo. It was just her, and part of her was gone, just as the others were.
A Frenzy of Sparks: A Novel Page 19
