Gia peeled the wallpaper back, pulling it away in one long line until it snapped free. She scraped another piece with a scissor, then another, until her room was streaked with yellow glue, the discarded paper all over the floor. It could sit there forever without anyone noticing, even when her mother left clean clothes on the bed.
Wasn’t someone supposed to talk to her? To see how she was doing now that her brother was gone? That was how it happened in movies, Maria from The Sound of Music strumming her guitar and singing things Gia felt inside, but Maria was not coming. Not even Lorraine anymore.
Her fingertips were numb. The whole room looked like a sick lung, but it was satisfying. Leo would’ve found it hilarious, Gia surrounded by strips, funnier than the time she’d dropped that crumb cake that had been cooling on her mother’s dresser, a handful of butter crumbs in her fist. But that wasn’t going to happen now, and it wouldn’t have happened before either. He probably wouldn’t have noticed. What fun was wallpaper compared to motorcycles?
Gia clicked her lock into place, threw the window seat cushions on the floor. They weren’t comfortable, never had been. She lay down on the smooth bench, cold wood seeping through the back of her shirt. She smelled. Maybe her mother didn’t want to say goodbye without looking like herself. It would be the last time they were in the same room together. Maybe she just wanted to be his mom one more time.
The dress Gia was supposed to wear hung from the closet door. It was black with blue buttons down the front. The tag dangled under the armpit. The blue buttons were wrong, too happy considering in two years she’d be the same age as Leo. In three, she’d be older than he’d ever been, and then she’d do things he’d never done. The list would get longer and longer.
Her mother was still in the bathroom. The door was closed, and the light was on. Gia imagined her mother against the tub, pins and rollers scattered on the floor, a box of tissues at her feet. She should knock and say she was sorry, pick up the pins, arrange the rollers on the sink, but she was tired of doing things adults were supposed to do. It made her inconsolably sad, like she’d woken up in the wrong part of her life, so she tucked clean clothes under her arm and went to Lorraine’s.
She wouldn’t have to explain. She would just fill the tub with water and wash her hair with Lorraine’s shampoo, scrubbing herself clean. Right now, someone was dressing her brother in a suit he’d never worn, combing his hair, straightening him into the best version of himself, tucking his feet into fancy shoes despite the marks on his arms. It was all wrong, but Gia would play her part.
She didn’t ring the bell. She went straight upstairs, where the door was open and Lorraine was sitting by the window.
“Saw you coming,” she said without turning around. Gia preferred being invisible.
Lorraine’s outfit for tomorrow was on the bed: slacks and a white blouse. Gia swallowed the lump in her throat. How stupid had she been to smooth that dress?
“I have to take a bath.” It was ridiculous when her own house was across the street, but Lorraine didn’t question it. She slid from the seat like a cat down a fence, landing soundlessly. It was only when she turned around that Gia noticed she’d been crying.
Lorraine filled the tub and tossed in a handful of dried flowers for healing that soaked up water, blooming back to life, as Gia slipped out of the clothes she’d been wearing for the past few days and stepped inside. She didn’t care that Lorraine was still there as she pulled the curtain closed and dunked her head.
“I keep thinking,” Lorraine said after a while. “We had a barbecue once at your house, like usual. I don’t know if you were born yet or if you were just really little, but Ray and everyone thought it was hilarious to throw things on the barbecue when your dad wasn’t looking. Like sticks and leaves, just stuff no one would notice. Then Ray undid his shoelace and dropped that into the flames. We thought it was so funny when your dad and Uncle Frank checked the grill. We’re rolling, and everyone kept asking what was so funny, which just made it funnier. And then Leo . . .”
Lorraine stopped. The faucet dripped ripples into the tub. It was rare to hear a story she hadn’t heard. It had more meaning now because he was gone. The bathwater steamed on her face.
“He threw his whole shoe in, right on top of the hamburgers and hot dogs, but it wasn’t funny. We knew he’d just gotten us in a ton of trouble, but he had this huge grin like we should be rolling. Sure enough, your dad walloped him, made him work it off. The thing is, he just couldn’t understand why he was in trouble. He didn’t think. He was just . . .”
Lorraine struggled for the right words.
“Onto the next thing?” Gia suggested. Like a pinball working the maze. All lights and motion.
“Exactly. There were no consequences. He never really learned from anything. He just bounced.”
There would be no more stories over what Leo had survived. Gia let that sink it.
“Your mom told mine it was a car accident.”
“It wasn’t.” There was an edge in Gia’s voice. She was on the verge of tears now.
“I know,” Lorraine said quietly.
Gia collected a palmful of flower petals.
“Do they work?” Gia asked quietly. “Do they really heal anything?”
Lorraine was quiet for a moment. “If you want them to.”
“Lorraine?” Gia worked up the nerve to ask the question she’d been dreading most since the night of the fire. “Where are you going?”
It was silent, but the air changed.
“India,” Lorraine whispered.
“India,” Gia repeated, rounding her tongue over the letters, as far away from here as anyone could get. How many planes did it take to get there? They must have to fill up their gas tanks like her father had on their Florida trip, guzzling gallons of fuel to keep them moving. Only this time, Lorraine was going alone. And she really was going. Gia hadn’t imagined it. She wished she were wrong, but the air felt right with it. It was true, all because of that place with the cushions and the accordion and those pretty words that made Lorraine almost happy again. Gia was jealous, maybe, that that place hadn’t been magic for her too.
“When?”
“Soon.”
Suddenly, she was too alone in the tub, the walls closing in, the overhead light too muddled through the steam to see clearly. Gia’s hand fished around the shower curtain, where it dripped a puddle on the floor. Lorraine’s hand found hers, and together they sat in the bathroom until the warmth in the air was all but gone and the water in the tub made Gia shiver.
The funeral was the uneventful thing her father had promised it would be. Gia stood between her mother and Lorraine under a cove of evergreen trees, their branches fanning with the breeze under a perfect blue sky. The pine box holding her brother was lowered into the ground by men in gray jumpsuits using canvas straps. There was no priest, no words, just creaking straps and handfuls of dirt, her mother crying softly, rows of identical pearl stones in every direction. Her brother’s stone would come later. For now, he had an index card on a metal spike stuck into pebbly soil.
Gia had taken her brother’s brontosaurus, a souvenir from the World’s Fair. That was the first time Gia’d ever had a belgian waffle piled with strawberries and whipped cream, powdered sugar fluttering off the top and trailing behind them as they’d carried it to the Unisphere and gobbled it down beneath those fountains. She’d meant to leave it for him, the plastic warming in her pocket on the ride, its legs poking into her skin when she shifted. He’d slipped it into his pocket from a souvenir bin, and he’d held it up outside the Unisphere and made it roar.
“Brontosauruses don’t roar,” she’d told him. “Nothing that eats leaves does.”
But he’d just shrugged and buried its face in the waffle. Roaring. Roaring. Roaring. Full of strawberries. Full of whipped cream and powdered sugar. Roaring. Roaring. Roaring. Already, she couldn’t remember his face in that moment, only that she’d laughed and he’d laughed, too, the sun peeking
out behind gray clouds as he’d licked whipped cream from his fingers, neither one caring who’d eaten more than the other, the whole plate piled high enough for both of them.
Gia didn’t have the heart to toss the dinosaur into the dirt. Not even after her mother tossed the cellophane rose she’d bought from a gypsy at a red light. Gia closed her hand around it instead and kept it in her pocket. She looked at her father, her mother, Lorraine, the two men in gray jumpsuits, the evergreen branches bobbing in the wind. In the distance, another open hole gaped in the ground, and Gia wondered who her father had been punishing when he’d said there wouldn’t be a proper funeral if Leo died this way.
It was a cemetery for war veterans all the way out on Long Island. Her mother sat in the passenger seat, staring out the window, perhaps knowing she’d never be able to come here alone, not without driving on highways. There were times on the ride back that she shot forward in her seat with urgency, memorizing this tree or that one, a curve in the road, some clue that would lead her back if she had the chance, while her father stared straight ahead, never once glancing through the rearview mirror.
Only once did her father pull off the highway, following a road full of hills that dipped suddenly, dropping Gia’s stomach with it. Homes peeked out from clusters of trees, the air fresh with earth. Brown leaves skittered across the road. Someone had made a fire, tossed in armloads of dead leaves, while chickens pecked on overgrown lawns and frost lingered on the grass. He pulled over next to a squat bungalow with a wagon wheel marking the house number against a wooden fence, got out, and lit a cigarette. The curtain peeled back, and a dark face watched their car idling in the street, leaves and pine cones crunching as he paced, puffing, maybe wishing he could stay here in this cedar-shingled house near her brother instead of driving them all the way back to the empty house, a reminder of how they had failed.
Lorraine watched it all with her hands folded in her lap, never moving. Gia hadn’t seen her eat or sip water or do anything human all day, just tuck stray pieces of her hair back into the elastic at the base of her neck when the open window shook them free.
After the World’s Fair as the Grand Central rolled out before them, Gia had blurted out that she wanted to be a scientist. She wanted to go to the moon. She wanted to dust off dinosaur bones in the middle of a desert. She wanted to invent a picture telephone and rocket shoes and a TV you could smell.
“Girls can’t be scientists,” Leo had said, laughing. “They won’t even send ’em to war, and you think they’d send ’em to the moon?”
“Tell you what, big shot.” Her father eyed Leo in the rearview mirror, where Leo had one leg propped on the back seat. “Take your foot down; then let’s hear what you want to be.”
Leo stared out the window for so long Gia didn’t think he’d answer. The streetlights had halos, and Gia was so tired each light blurred into the next. Heat crashed through the open windows, and finally Leo answered.
“Nothing.”
Her father laughed, but it was a dry, unhappy sound.
“Not an option.”
But Leo had stared out the window at shadow shapes, as if he’d known something they didn’t.
Death, Gia realized, wasn’t a tide that washed in and out on moon time. In all her life, she couldn’t think of anything that washed out without washing in again. Except this, and the thought of it coming for her felt like taking the red ribbon Nonna had left under their mattresses to ward off the evil eye, tying it around her neck, and pulling at the loose strings until it had choked off any promise of what had come before as the car rolled over the open road.
Chapter Nineteen
Night hadn’t given in yet. It was still inky black, the streetlights hazy orbs, so quiet Gia could hear herself breathe, enough to make her nauseous because she hated quiet now. She curled into a ball on the couch, waiting.
It might be too late already. Lorraine’s house was dark, with only the faintest glow of the hallway night-light drifting into Lorraine’s room. Aunt Diane must’ve bought that light when Lorraine was little, afraid of her sleepy eyed near the steps. Or maybe it hadn’t been Aunt Diane but Agnes, picking up an extra when she’d bought one for Gia and Leo, replacing the bulb whenever she’d changed it for her own children.
Already, it felt less like Lorraine’s house and more like Aunt Diane’s shell.
The stairs creaked behind her under her father’s weight. She must be right if he was awake, too, setting up the percolator, sensing another change rolling in with the tide while Agnes slept, holding away another loss with shapeless dreams.
Aunt Ida’s door opened first. She and Uncle Frank hobbled down the walkway, her arm laced through his, with Tommy trailing behind, to make the long ride upstate for visiting hours where Ray was waiting for trial.
“If he makes it,” her father had said.
“Why wouldn’t he?”
“They don’t want him to talk, Gia. Can’t put a rat on the stand.”
That body plunking over the side of the boat had a face now. That was the last time they’d talked about it. Gia didn’t want to hear any more.
Tommy had regained the weight he’d lost and was back in sweats again. It didn’t make her happy, just heavy, like climbing a tree in all her winter clothes, as the taillights flashed and the car pulled away from the curb.
When the front door opened across the street, Lorraine was barely a shadow. Only the streetlights confirmed that she was really there at all in her jeans and old flannel top, looping her arms through the straps of an army backpack. It was too small for her to be leaving for good, but when Lorraine locked the front door and slipped the keys in the mailbox, Gia’s stomach lurched. She hadn’t thought there were any feelings left in her to well up, but they rushed in now: Lorraine’s hand trailing through the water when they swam in the canal, makeup brushes over Gia’s closed eyes, falling asleep back to back on Friday sleepovers, waiting outside the bakery for Lorraine to finish work, untying string from cookie boxes, how Lorraine always burned her mouth on the first triangle bite of pizza. She was leaving and Gia was staying, only there wasn’t any anger in it. Just a mild shock, like waking up to realize the power had gone out or the water had come up from a storm she’d slept through. She couldn’t stop it, just like leaving a calendar page on the wrong month wouldn’t stop time, so she pulled her shoes on and lingered by the door.
“Don’t you want to say goodbye?”
Her father stirred the spoon in his mug behind her and took a sip, his eyes suddenly wet. Maybe it was just steam, but he shook his head, and Gia understood: there had already been too many goodbyes.
He cleared his throat and pressed change into her hand. “Call me when you’re ready, wherever you are. I’ll pick you up.”
Lorraine was halfway down the block, lost under the army bag on her back. She’d sewn a patch of embroidered flowers to it: War is not healthy for children and other living things, the flowers and script bright against the gray camouflage. Everything she needed was in that bag, zippered shut. Did Aunt Diane know her daughter was leaving for good, going on an airplane, crossing oceans? Gia had traced a line on the map from New York to India with her finger, crossing the Atlantic Ocean; the Mediterranean Sea; the Arabian Sea; maybe even the Bay of Bengal, which fed the Indian Ocean; and a puzzle of imperfectly drawn countries, the jagged lines a squabble of yours and mine.
It was worse, maybe, when someone was leaving because they wanted to, but they were still physically here, the best parts of them closed off because they no longer wanted to share. Lorraine would never come back. When she stepped off the plane and smelled new unraveling flowers for the first time and woke up to new birdsongs, knowing that coming home meant collecting empty bottles beside her mother’s chair and heating TV dinners, Lorraine would sink her feet into the new earth. She was a tree, like the one in her story, her roots calling out to the others, only no one had heard her. Including Gia. So when Lorraine looked over her shoulder as Gia fell into step beside her
, she hoped Lorraine understood the apology in it for not taking her to the marsh that night and hiding in the spartina, letting it weave around them under a maze of hidden stars and mosquitoes that would pull the blood from their arms and legs without apology.
They walked in silence. Lorraine looked at her feet as if they were moving without her permission, or to the brightening sky, the houses they’d known since they were kids, trick-or-treating, babysitting, chasing stray dogs and cats.
The walk to the airport was full of tall weeds. Lorraine’s hair was pulled back into a ponytail, brushed and clean but not styled anymore. Not since. She wasn’t wearing makeup, but she was more beautiful without it. Inside the weeds, people slept. The grass rustled as others walked, their heads just above the tallest places, like ghosts in an abandoned world. Neither flinched at their stained clothes, the smell of their unwashed bodies, because they knew now how close any of us were to becoming people in the weeds. Choices.
They were getting closer. There was so much Gia wanted to say, and also nothing.
Cars pulled over to wait on the highway. Morning was just breaking, but the airport was already awake with people stepping from taxis, trailing luggage larger than Lorraine’s backpack, their skin illuminated in the glow of fluorescent lights, holding them all in a tank without time.
They paused at the door.
“Check on my mother sometimes. Maybe tell her a story or something.”
Gia stared at the sparkles in the concrete. Quartz. Almost as tough as a diamond. She wished she were half as strong, because Lorraine leaving was unbearable. Gia crossed her arms over her stomach and held tightly.
“And you can take anything you want from my room.”
People pushed past with luggage. Fancy suitcases with leather tags, swinging through the revolving doors in a blur.
“You could visit me. The world is bigger than just here. And I want to see it, Gia. Some people believe we get more than one chance at life, that we keep coming back, but what if we don’t? I’m glad it happened, Gia. All of it. Maybe it did all happen for a reason, and I just can’t see it yet.”
A Frenzy of Sparks: A Novel Page 23
