Crazy Louann rode by on her bike, humming “It’s a Small World” and sprinkling cat food from the basket, honking the horn. Was she happy, Gia wondered, alone with her cats, as Gia was alone on the steps? More kids tumbled up the mum-lined walkway, laughing, throwing their arms around one another. Two kids were making out in a car in front of the house as cats slunk out from under parked cars and snatched a few bites before disappearing again. Nine lives each. That was the world, Gia thought; take your bite and leave.
Mr. Angliotti’s front window glowed. A sunrise orange. Or a candle in a jack-o’-lantern. But Mr. Angliotti was at church, and there were no cars out front; it couldn’t be his children visiting. The light in the window pulsed. How could it be that bright?
Gia crept closer. The ground oozed under her sneakers, mud clinging to the backs of her legs as her brain squawked: a thousand birds crying, flitting between trees, calling out danger on the ground. This was stupid. The rhododendron bush scraped her arm, her bones begging her not to take another step while music pulsed from Ray and Tommy’s party.
The back door swung with the breeze, one glass pane gaping, exhaling black smoke. The ground was covered in mud and broken glass. The air was heavy with smoke. Not the pleasant smell of campfire smoke or barbecue coals but burning. Plastic, fabric, plaster, wood, paint, clothes, rugs, wires—fire turning everything to embers. Gia froze. Smoke burned her eyes, her nose and lungs, as heat curled the hair on her arms. The memory of that oar cracked across her back. Leo was in there. She was sure of it. He hadn’t found whatever he needed at her house, so he’d come here.
She couldn’t go in there. Couldn’t drag him from whatever room he was in. She imagined a backpack of Mr. Angliotti’s stolen things at his feet, war medals, a needle. A bottle cap.
But her father would. Her mother. They would duck the smoke, crawling from room to room, because they’d made him, because they wouldn’t be able to live with knowing they hadn’t been brave. This smell would haunt her when she was old in her bed, same as the marsh and that body sinking below the surface would, knowing she’d stood here with the heat on her face and done nothing. That was the difference between them, wasn’t it? He’d left her for dead on that island, but it wasn’t in her. She was her father’s daughter.
“Leo!” Gia’s voice was unfamiliar, startling. She did it again, screaming into the smoke. It carried weirdly over the crackling. Something popped, and sparks flew. His name filled the air around her over and over again. She should call the police. Or the fire department. Panic flashed through her. They wouldn’t be able to cover this up. Her father’s entire career destroyed by his son. Everyone would know. It would ruin them.
She was inside, crawling under the smoke, thinking of her father kicking down doors in dark hallways and rushing from room to room with a gun and a flashlight, his partner at his back. The bathroom door was open. Something slid. There were pills under Gia’s palms, sticking to her skin, bottles on the floor, the medicine cabinet door ripped off and tossed aside so that the broken mirror reflected a girl on all fours and a boy curled into himself mumbling, rocking, knowing he’d screwed up bad.
It was pathetic. This was not the boy who’d held his breath to swim under boats.
“Get up!” she yelled, pulling him by the collar.
His eyes met hers, wild and unfocused, and Gia saw herself finally, as her brother had as he’d darted away on the boat or stuffed stolen candy into her backpack, or when she’d jumped off her sled and stared at the sky, that beautiful blue, Gia quietly changing, quietly growing, with a stillness he envied. She had never been less than he was. She’d always been more.
The smoke sank. She grabbed his collar, made him crawl toward the open door, surprised by his deadweight, until they were in the yard. Mud seeped through his clothes. They had to get out of here before anyone came back from church or took a smoke break outside the party.
“Crawl,” she hissed. He did, slowly, the same way he might’ve when they were kids playing horse and cowboy and she’d ridden on his back. He would’ve died in there. She pulled him by the back of his shirt, pushing away the thought that she should’ve left him like he’d left her.
The house was lit up now, flaming orange in the windows and eerily dark everywhere else. She prayed no one would come home yet. They were almost there; then she’d call the fire department, and fire trucks would scream up the block. She spit the taste out of her mouth. It was black on the sidewalk.
She dumped Leo on the hallway floor and ran for the phone, spinning the numbers as fast as she could. Her words came out in a jumble. A fire. The address. Her face smudged with smoke in the hallway mirror, hair stuck to her in damp strands. The operator asked her name. Nausea doubled her over. She slammed the phone down so hard it bounced out of the receiver.
There were sirens in the distance. Gia sat on the floor as the house consumed itself.
There were things in the flames: outlines of doorframes, a falling beam. She should wash her face, change her clothes, but all she could do was watch it burn. Tears stung the smoke out of her eyes. It ran down her face in black rivers, her chest tight. What would her father say? Her mother. In her pretty dress.
“You did this,” she hissed. Her voice cracked. Leo mumbled to himself. The worst part was it would keep happening. He would steal again, break more houses, burn things down. Gia hated him for it, this lying, bottomless thing he’d become, while everyone cleaned up around him.
The block filled with swirling lights. Firemen hopped off the truck, ran hoses, opened a hydrant as people ran back from church. Word was out. Gia couldn’t watch when Mr. Angliotti got here, when he stood outside the house he had lived in his whole life with his parents and then his wife and children. Water sprayed. Firemen shouted. More trucks. People covered their mouths, rumors starting in their heads. Such a terrible thing. In her heart, she was the terrible thing.
More lights and sirens screamed up the block in blue-and-white cruisers this time, cornering Aunt Ida’s house, driving onto the lawn and surrounding the doors. They shouted through bullhorns for everyone to come out with their hands up, lined kids against the aluminum siding, and patted them down as the police filed inside to search Aunt Ida and Uncle Frank’s home. They led Ray and Antonio out in handcuffs, shoved them roughly into a cruiser, and slammed the doors hard as the other kids were let go one by one and police filed out of the house with cardboard boxes.
Tommy was on the porch with his hands under the mailbox, eyeing the cop pacing behind him.
Don’t dart, you moron, Gia prayed. If the cops cared about anything he had to say, he’d be in the back of that cruiser too. But if he ran, they’d crush him. Nightsticks and all. All he had to do was stay still.
But he ran. He barely made it to the curb before they were on him, his face smashed into the dirt, kicking, kicking, kicking until the cops got his arms behind his back, cuffed his wrists, and his sneakers went still. Ray pounded at the window of the cruiser. The other kids streamed past in flashes of fringe. The cops stood up, dusted themselves off. The parked cars shuffled away, like the street game where a ball was under a cup and you had to guess which one, where no one won except the dealer. Ray’s car was lonely in the driveway. On the ground, Tommy was still. They left him in the dirt as the cruisers drove off, one by one, carting away whatever they’d come for, until the police threw Tommy in the back of one too. It took two cops to lift him.
Her mother burst through the door and turned on the light, where Leo and Gia were on the floor, covered in mud and smoke. The light snapped off.
“Oh my God,” Agnes said in the darkness, stepping over them both, heading for the kitchen, where she put her head in her hands and sobbed into the hollow space.
Chapter Fifteen
All night, it smelled of ashes.
“You did not see anything, do you understand?” The panic in her voice cut through Gia’s numbness as Agnes closed the curtains and forced Gia into the shower, where the smell washed ou
t of her hair, her skin. Soot ran down the drain in dark puddles. But it was inside her, too, burning her nose, throat, lungs, the places she used to be happy. She nodded. The warm water wouldn’t stop the shivery feeling. It wouldn’t go away.
“And neither of you was at that party?”
No. At least that was true. Agnes probably wished she were yelling at them for throwing beer cans in Aunt Ida’s bushes instead of setting Mr. Angliotti’s house on fire as she threw Leo in the shower and told him to take whatever he needed to stay quiet and not leave his damn room. Then she mopped the hallway while water boiled on the stove for tea to soothe Gia’s coughing. Leo passed out in his room. Agnes put a blanket over him, rolled him onto his side. She didn’t ask what had happened.
Gia was layers of an ocean. Numb at the outer layer, where the sun should’ve warmed her, where she should’ve been teeming with life. Underneath, she was a cold nothing. She sipped her tea, but it didn’t help. Agnes stood on the porch, a silhouette in the smoke, watching Aunt Ida scream at the cops about what they’d done to her house and where were her sons? The car with Ray and Antonio was gone. It was odd that they’d put them together. Never once had her father questioned her and Leo together for anything half as bad. No one got the truth that way unless they didn’t want it.
When Agnes carried tea to Leo’s room, Gia decided she would move out and live with Lorraine. If Leo lived here, fine, but not Gia. She wanted to read and go to school and wave at neighbors when she rode her bike instead of keeping her head down as people whispered about him. The one whose father is a cop. Imagine—how embarrassing. Your own son. She couldn’t be part of it.
She stuffed a handful of clothes in a backpack. The effort made her light headed, forcing her head between her knees. Then tears burned as soot washed out, her body fighting to heal. Why, she thought, couldn’t Leo’s just do the same?
She crept down the stairs as Agnes argued into the kitchen phone. “What do you mean, he’s not there? He left this morning, and he never gets his days mixed up. Yes, I’ll hold.”
Gia crossed the street in the blankets her mother had put around her. Mr. Angliotti sat on his lawn in a plastic chair, the house a black frame in the darkness, matching her shock. The smell of it was everywhere, stronger than low tide.
An officer held a glass of water for Mr. Angliotti. Her father. He drank it in one long gulp and let it fall. It landed in the grass, but neither picked it up. Gia inched closer, slowly because it hurt to breathe and the smoke made her light headed. The trail of flattened grass where Leo had crawled was nauseating. She wanted to slide under her father’s free arm, breathe into his coat as he squeezed her shoulders, smelling like coffee from the station. She wanted to memorize her father just as he was before he knew. Eddie put his coat around Mr. Angliotti. He was not the great fixer of everything, but he tried.
If she were Leo, this would be a moment to put something in her veins, because it was unbearable. She stared at a streetlight until it made stars, like that exploding transformer months ago. Her mouth filled with acid. Was that when it had gone wrong, the day they’d sold the bike? She forced the thought down, because there was no magic medicine.
She was shivering again, so hard her teeth chattered. Eddie gave Mr. Angliotti’s shoulder a squeeze. Something fell inside the steaming house, but Mr. Angliotti was still, staring. Her father split away, and as the distance between her father and the old man grew, the kindness in him hardened off, like a dead thing stiffening into a horrible shape. He plowed past her without noticing.
“Dad?” she whispered. He stopped cold. She had not spoken to him since the island, and the surprise on his face was painful. Why did he have to look at her like that, like he already knew? Gia was shaking. The blanket fell off her shoulders into a puddle at her feet. The knapsack slid down with it. He knew.
“Oh, Jesus, Gia.” He put his hands on his head and paced. “Jesus, Gia,” he begged. She’d never heard his voice like this before. It terrified her. “Tell me you had nothing to do with this.”
Gia could not breathe. Air would not pass her nose. It would not reach her lungs. She tried again until there wasn’t enough air to keep standing. She sat in the street, her father pacing and pulling at chunks of his hair until he doubled over, clutching his stomach.
“Gia, please . . . ,” he begged. “What will they find in there?”
Gia sobbed. She hadn’t thought of that. What would they find? God, they would know. The pills on the floor. The stolen things. Girl-size footprints preserved under fallen debris. She would go to jail. No, she couldn’t go to jail. She was only thirteen. She couldn’t go to jail, could she?
“What did he do?”
Gia could not stop shaking. The words would not come.
“Gia, answer!” He shook her shoulders to snap her out of it. Her neck bounced forward and back. Her mother ran down the walk, her bathrobe flying, that pretty dress underneath.
“Eddie, come inside,” she urged, pulling at his elbow.
“Agnes,” he said, that same cry in his voice.
Her mother’s face gave it away. They were still, staring at each other, Gia forgotten on the ground, before the air around her father changed, prickling Gia’s skin.
“Eddie, stop.” Agnes reached for his arm, but he shook her off, charging up the walkway.
“Gia, get up,” she urged, already running after Eddie.
Gia couldn’t move. Her father flung the door open, took the steps in leaps. In the glow of her brother’s room, her father was a spiderlike shape that landed on Leo in his bed, his fist cracking down. The sound of it traveling through the open window broke through her. She’d never seen her father hit anyone, let alone her brother. Agnes screamed for him to stop.
But he couldn’t. Gia covered her ears, humming to drown out the sound. Behind her, Mr. Angliotti was still in that lawn chair. She could not go inside. She sat in the street on her blanket, covering her ears, her face in her knees, praying a car would squash her. She almost did not see the front door open at Aunt Ida’s or Aunt Ida carrying blankets and a tray to Mr. Angliotti, kneeling beside him to set it down. It was not real, the glass with the straw, the plate of food, nor was it real when Mr. Angliotti followed Aunt Ida to her house down the mum-lined walkway, the plastic lawn chair abandoned. Why don’t you fix my father and Leo too? Gia thought bitterly. She wished the fire had been at Aunt Ida’s house instead, crumbling the marble heads and the new shag rugs, burning up Ray’s room while they watched on the lawn in their only clothes, so they could feel how unfair it was to have your life snatched away.
Inside, the noise stopped, and the silence was worse, final. Aunt Ida’s door opened again, and Aunt Ida, Gia realized, was coming right for her, still in her church outfit, though her blouse had come untucked, her skirt wrinkled.
“Gia,” she said softly, her voice breaking. “You shouldn’t be in the street. God forbid . . .”
She looked off toward the swimming canal, bit her lower lip. Gia dug her fingers into the blanket Nonna had crocheted, gathered it around her.
“It’s so late, and . . .” Aunt Ida’s voice broke off. “It’s time for bed.”
She was all tears, a blurry face. “Where is my boy, Gia? Where did they take him?”
Gia stared. Silence stuck in her throat again, same as after the marsh. Aunt Ida wrapped her arms around herself, asking where her son was, and Gia couldn’t take it, couldn’t take the delicacy of someone who didn’t deserve to be delicate.
“Leave,” Gia said finally, then louder, and again, pushing it from her throat until Eddie crossed the lawn. Aunt Ida whirled on him.
“You did this,” she hissed, jabbing a finger at the air. “I don’t know how, but it was you. You did this, and I know it.”
But Eddie just stared, his silence making the size difference between them more obvious as Aunt Ida jabbed her useless finger until she gave up and took off back to her house of bleach and polish, which used to be the prettiest on the block before th
e new houses made it look squat, before kids walked all over the new rugs and police tossed everything around despite Aunt Ida’s careful dusting and vacuuming, making the sum of her work a great big fat zero.
“Go inside, Gia,” her father said. “Please. Just go inside.”
Then he took off down the smoky street, and Gia knew the night was not over.
Chapter Sixteen
Gia got up. The world turned to salt and pepper briefly. She left the blankets and her knapsack in the street because she couldn’t remember what was inside, why she’d packed it in the first place. Where would they be? Where would they go? There were endless places. The marsh, Leo’s weeds. All in plain sight. She walked toward the canal, drawn there in the same way she always was, and squatted by the water’s edge, dipped her fingertips.
The new houses watched over the scene on the other side of the swimming canal, smug with their air conditioner cutouts and shiny new windows, probably enjoying how quickly Mr. Angliotti’s house had leveled because it had been made by the kind of people who’d never live in the new houses.
Only one was missing windows and doors. Only one had a car parked out front. The others were still, but not this one. Shadows moved inside. She knew that car.
Gia was a moth, flapping stupidly, paper wings warping as the light intensified and drew her closer; she knew there was no other choice. The real Gia split away until she was more like a tree trunk watching a leaf from its own branch drift to the ground. From above, she could watch the girl in a flannel nightgown and Keds tiptoe across gravel, pause behind a car, crawl under a dark porch full of pebbles and debris, where a wire cut her hand and blood pooled on the cuff. The nightgown tangled, but she kept crawling toward the voices above the beams and plywood. The girl on the ground used to be afraid of snakes and centipedes, of dark basements. Now, nothing could hurt her, not when the real her was high above and safe.
A Frenzy of Sparks: A Novel Page 20
