All the Children Are Home

by Patry Francis

  My way was to take up a bit of my long-neglected mending and to sit by the phone, pretending I wasn’t watching it. That I wasn’t willing Lou and Jimmy to walk through the door with Agnes, smiling with everything in her. When she was with us, that smile seemed like the most ordinary sight in the world. Even annoying at times. Only now did I see it for what it was: one of those miracoli Anna went on about.

  Zaidie didn’t allow herself any easy comfort. Never had since the day she first walked into the parlor, holding on to her poor brother’s hand tight enough to cut the circulation, their mother only a week dead.

  “No abuse or anything—not like the usual cases,” the case worker said, filling me in. “These kids were well taken care of. The lady just got sick.”

  “And the father?”

  “Apparently ran off with a young girl when his wife got pregnant with the baby. The mother just moved here a year ago, hoping to start fresh. A few months later, she got the diagnosis.”

  “If it’s such a good family, there must be someone—”

  “An aunt in New Jersey, who only just heard about the kids. Otherwise, well, it was a mixed marriage. Baptist father, Jewish mother—both strict. From what I understand, neither side had much to do with them.” She shook her head. “Sad—given how it all turned out.”

  “As long as no one expects us to take them to Synagogue.” I shuddered. “Or church.” Another silent shudder.

  “The mother was non-practicing, and they haven’t even been able to find the father.” She handed me a card: LUCILLE MENDELSON, D.D.S. followed by a New Jersey address and phone number. “That’s the aunt. You can expect her to visit from time to time.”

  “A lady dentist?”

  “Says she’d take them herself, but with her work and all—”

  “So it’s likely to be long-term.” I reached for the baby, already thinking how I would carry him into the sun, love him until he forgot the sorrows of his mother’s house. As for the girl, they would have to find a placement elsewhere.

  “We stay together, Jon and me,” Zaida said. Only six years old but watching me with those narrow eyes of hers. “I promised Mama.”

  Like all Emergencies, she knew more than most adults about the bargains life drives—hard, unfair, implacable—to use a word I learned from a quiz in my Reader’s Digest. She was a match for them, too. In spite of how I felt about girls, I couldn’t say no.

  AND THIS WAS the price of it. Sometimes I think she knows me better than I know myself. I hadn’t even gotten the needle threaded before she was after me. “But what if she doesn’t call the cops like you said? What if no one does, Ma?”

  When Anna’s rosaries hit the stove on cue, the needle punctured my index finger. I watched the blood pearl. “For goodness sake. Now see what you made me do?”

  Zaidie continued to stare at me as if I hadn’t spoken. Waiting.

  I put my finger to my mouth and tasted the blood. “If she doesn’t make the call, the department surely will. And besides, Dad and Jimmy probably already—”

  “They been gone almost an hour. They woulda found her by now if she was on the route. And—”

  “She’s a ward of the state, Zaida. The department will take care of it. Haven’t you got homework?”

  “No one in Agnes’s whole life ever did what they were supposed to do for her, Ma. Why would they now?” She pushed the phone in my direction. Like I said, if life was implacable, Zaida Finn was more so.

  Apparently, Anna was listening all along, too, because the rhythm of the prayers she was reciting with feet and fingers and tongue abruptly ceased. She stood in the doorway, looking so small and hunched it was impossible to believe she had given birth to the towering man people nicknamed Frankenstein. But the authority in her voice and in the hand gesture that sliced through me like a sword belied her size.

  “You hear the girl, Dahlia? I would call the polizia myself, but my English not so good. While you wait, that piccola out there alone in the dark.” She hesitated for a minute, beads in hand, and spoke in a lower voice. “You gonna let those people keepa you afraid your whole life, Dahlia? Madonne. That Chief Wood—”

  “For God’s sake, Anna! Enough.”

  In thirty minutes, we’d both violated the unspoken pact that had kept the peace between us for twenty years. I’d let slip what I thought of the God who abandoned me when I needed him most, and she’d blurted out what she thought of the way I lived my life.

  Even worse, she had spoken the name I had worked so hard to banish from my mind. Out loud. When my hands began to shake, I buried them in my mending.

  It was Jon who convinced me. Crawling onto my lap, his eyes were as serious as they’d been when he stood at the door at fourteen months old. He held Agnes’s blue car on his palm like an offering. “I want to play with her, Ma. Please don’t let Agnes get hurted.”

  Good Lord. As if I had that kind of power. I nudged him off my lap.

  “Get them out of here then, Anna. Take them for a drive—to your house, for an ice cream cone—anywhere. If I’m gonna do this, I need to be alone.”

  Zaidie studied me, looking deep as she could into the one part of my life she would never know. Then she went to the closet and got her coat. Hers and Jon’s, too. “Come on, Jonny. We’re going to Nonna’s house.”

  Chapter Ten

  The Coward

  DAHLIA

  THE HOUSE EMPTY, I TOOK UP ANNA’S PACING. BUT IT WASN’T long before I butted straight into the reason I took kids in the first place. Not for their sake—like those who thought me and Lou were some kind of heroes believed. Hah. And sure as hell not for the money, though there were plenty who assumed that, too. The only way a mental cripple like you could make a living. My mother had so much as said it.

  But no. The real reason was because there’s something louder than dogs barking and kids scrapping, doors slamming, newborns wailing, and the things of this world being shattered one by one. A noise I would have done just about anything to drown out, even if it meant taking a pack of kids, delinquents or otherwise. Taking them not just into my house, but into the deepest part of myself.

  Soon as Anna left with Zaidie and Jon, there it was. When I could no longer hide my foolish shakes, I walked rhythmically like my mother-in-law with her beads. But instead of praying, I cursed everyone and everything, starting with Louie. What on God’s earth was keeping him? If he couldn’t find her, why didn’t he come home?

  Jimmy, too. Mrs. Doherty was right: If he hadn’t been off preening for some girl at the Grainer School, Agnes would be settled into her new life by now.

  Then there was Nancy—in fact, the whole damn department—going back to the woman who promised not to send me any girls. Incompetent liars, the lot of them. Couldn’t even be counted on to call the damn police in an emergency.

  And why was I alone here with the noise anyway? Walking miles in my own house to avoid the stupid phone? That was Zaidie’s fault. I felt her eyes on me even now, heard her voice in my head: You have to do it, Ma. Not someone else. You.

  Why had I ever let that one stay?

  Yes, I cursed them all—from Agnes’s no-good mother to my neighbor Josie Pennypacker, who was out on the porch yelling for her cat like all was right with the world. “Flufferrr-belllll!” Good Lord, was there ever a sillier name?

  Then there was Anna . . . barging into my house with her rosaries and her pies, hanging her picture of the Pope on the wall like she had a right. She knew Zaidie never missed a trick but she said that name in front of her anyway. Said it in front of me. Well, she could keep away from now on, her and her manicotti with homemade gravy, the comments she pretended to speak to herself in the kitchen. What kinda wife serves her husband macaroni from a can? Madonne. I could see her shaking her head at me from across town.

  Now that his name was out there, I cursed Calvin Wood, too. Chief Calvin Wood—him and his family and the whole stupid city that worshipped them. Bunch of know-nothing fools.

  I WAS CAREFUL
to avoid the mirror, but I didn’t have to see my face to know the one I truly despised: the foolish young girl with a head full of crazy dreams and no idea what the world was. Or even what she was.

  The wreck of a woman she grew up to be.

  The coward. Oh yes, her I hated most of all.

  I can’t do it, the coward yelled at the phone every time she passed it. Do you hear me? I can’t do it.

  The only answer was the noise in my head: memory. Well, damn that to hell, too, because this time there was something that spoke even louder. My eyes gravitated to the manila folder on top of the bookcase.

  “How long you gonna hang on to that?” Louie asked a week or so after I first read Agnes’s file. “I thought I told you to throw that damn thing out.” But as the weeks passed it had become part of the décor, like the table where I did my puzzles or Anna’s Pope, who stared me down every time I walked past him.

  Despite the horrors of Agnes’s first year, with its stench of shit and garbage and near starvation, it was the second half of the file, the one that told the mundane story of all the kids that ever passed through my door, that haunted me. The child set loose in a world where no one ever looked at her the way Louie and me did our three, the ragged, mismatched clothes packed and unpacked in a series of paper sacks as she moved from house to house, unseen and unloved until she—or sometimes he—finally arrived on Mr. Dean’s stoop or someplace like it. If there was one thing in the world there was no shortage of, it was those doors. Those stoops.

  But what I saw most clear of all when I glanced at that file was the way she looked the day I sent her away. How she had stood up straight and gone. How she had set her face.

  My hands were oddly steady when I picked up the phone.

  It was past eight anyway, I told myself. Surely, the chief of police had gone home to his family by now. Even if he was there, he would have more important business to worry about than an Indian kid who got lost walking across town. Most likely she’d met up with someone she used to play with in the neighborhood and gone home to supper with them. It wouldn’t have been the first time I got myself all riled up over nothing.

  “It’s about the Juniper girl,” the officer who answered the phone at the Claxton Police Department called out after I stated my business.

  His was the next voice I heard: “Chief Wood here.”

  Between those words and my own, I encountered the bendy nature of time. Probably less than a minute passed, but it was long enough to contain a lifetime—no, more than that. All the lifetimes that might have been.

  Last time I heard that voice, he was thirteen and it cracked every time he spoke. Not yet Chief anybody, he wasn’t even Calvin except at school. He was just Cal, the little brother I met when Bobby brought me to the house for dinner one Sunday. “Might as well get it over with and meet ’em all at once,” Bobby had said, explaining that all five brothers, even the oldest who was a junior at Boston College, came home every Sunday for roast beef and custard pie. “The only one who ducks out sometimes is Silas, but you don’t want to meet him anyway.”

  “Why not?”

  Bobby shrugged. “Dad says he’s the mailman’s kid.”

  I looked at him curiously, thinking of Silas, the surly boy I knew from school. He seemed so different from the others I almost wondered if it was true. However, Bobby had already dropped it. As we climbed the hill to the mayor’s house, he teased me about being nervous.

  “Well, your hand feels sweaty,” he said—though they weren’t. Was he disappointed? Angry even? I brushed off the thought, but maybe I saw more than I admitted. Otherwise, why would I remember such a trivial thing all these years later?

  That day, though, I just laughed. Nervous? Things that scared other people turned my skin rosy with excitement. With life. I hadn’t even been afraid when I’d spoken in front of the whole school in my campaign for vice president of the junior class. I looked over and saw Bobby, the handsome son of the mayor, who was running for president, grinning at me as I finished. By the time the votes were tallied, I had won both the election and the boy.

  I didn’t feel afraid that day, climbing those wide steps with the ostentatious stone lions on each side, either. The family symbol, according to Bobby. I wasn’t as pretty as some or as smart as others, but I walked around like someone who was born lucky and the Woods, natural politicians all of them, even those who never ran for office, knew that was what mattered.

  At the table, they praised Dahlia’s Place, the little Italian restaurant my parents had named after me when I was three. It was a hole-in-the-wall with stereotypical red-checked tablecloths and candles in Chianti bottles straight out of Lady and the Tramp, but on weekends there was always a line out the door.

  “Best meatballs in the city,” the mayor said, kissing his knuckles like a paisan, though I was pretty sure he’d never been there.

  “Margie, you should have made some lasagna for our special guest. A nice Italian girl like this doesn’t want a boring roast, do you, Dahl?” He winked as the nickname they would always use was born.

  I tried to say I loved roast beef and that Mrs. Wood’s was the most tender cut I’d ever had, but Bobby stopped me.

  “She’s only part Italian, Dad; I told you that. Her name’s Garrison.” Bobby grasped my hand under the table. That’s when I noticed his was the sweaty one. Why, I couldn’t guess. I stored it up in memory, though.

  “My mother’s family is from Naples,” I said, pulling away from Bobby as I reveled in the attention. “But Dad’s an all-American mutt.”

  Predictable as the laugh track, everyone at the table flashed perfect teeth, smoothing over Bobby’s moment of temper. I had never met anyone so responsive as the Woods. In their presence, my jokes were funnier, my stories fascinating; even the color of my eyes felt deeper.

  “An all-American mutt. You hear that, Marge?” the mayor laughed. “Bobby says you’re already talking about college. Got big plans for the future. That’s what we like to see; don’t we, boys?”

  Marge scooped more mashed potatoes onto my plate. “Any idea what you want to study?”

  “I’ve been thinking about law,” I told her. Before that, I had only allowed myself to dream of that when I was alone in my room or when I was busing tables at the restaurant on weekends.

  I flushed, as if I’d taken too large a portion of the beef, revealing an unladylike appetite. “Or maybe nursing. One of my aunts is a nurse.”

  Mayor Wood frowned so briefly that someone who wasn’t used to disapproval would have missed it. In an instant, though, his sunny expression had returned.

  “Nursing is a wonderful profession for a bright girl like yourself,” he said, pointedly ignoring my other choice. “In fact, my Margie was studying to be a nurse when we first met. Tell her, Marge. She looked pretty cute in that uniform, too.”

  Mom—cute? How ridiculous was that? The boys rolled their eyes—all but Calvin, who was fixed on me. He reddened when I caught him staring.

  “Two important professions—though very different,” Mrs. Wood said. She paused to take a bite of that tender meat, chewing it slowly. “Choose the one that sets your heart on fire, and don’t let anyone talk you out of it.”

  I couldn’t remember anyone talking to me like that. Even my guidance counselor had argued for practicality. I could almost feel something stretching, opening up, becoming inside me. Could I really do it?

  “I think you should pick lawyer,” Cal blurted out from across the table, as if he’d heard my silent question. He looked more like his mother than the rest, I decided. Reminded me of her, too.

  “And I think little brother has a crush. Look at him; he’s the color of that radish right there.” Bobby laughed, pointing at his salad. I got the sense that laughing at Cal—albeit good-naturedly—was a family sport. For a minute, I wondered if Silas, too, was teased—perhaps less kindly—and that was the reason he avoided family dinners.

  “Nothing wrong with that. We Woods know a pretty girl when w
e see one; don’t we, Cal?” the mayor put in, interrupting my thoughts.

  Did all politicians follow every statement with a question, subtly demanding consensus, or was it just the mayor?

  Mrs. Wood moved the green beans around her plate with a fork. “Leave him alone, Russ. All of you.” No one was listening, though. When our eyes met across the table, we both looked away quickly.

  Looking back, the seeds of everything that would happen later were all there at that first meal, if I’d only had eyes to see. But of course, we don’t.

  For weeks, I bragged about my dinner at the house where the lions stood guard, marveling at the table setting, the conversation, the tenderness of the roast.

  “Which of my brothers did you like best?” Bobby asked on the way home.

  “They’re all nice. Your mom and dad, too.” Still holding his hand, I pulled a half-step ahead of him. He wasn’t as smart as me, but he had a shrewdness I didn’t possess. One look at my face and he would have seen I was lying. If I said I particularly liked Cal, that I’d seen something sweet, something different from the rest in the boy who’d sat across the table, I sensed he would pay for it. And probably I would, too.

  “THAT YOU, DAHL?” Chief Wood said into the phone after the forever minute had passed.

  How did he know? Had he memorized the sound of my breath all those years ago?

  And that nickname. Dahl.

  My silence was apparently confirmation enough. “You have one hell of a nerve calling this number,” he went on, more confident than before. “Brazen as ever, I see.”

  Well, you would have thought I’d die. After all, words like that, spoken in the same tone, had imprisoned me in my house for twenty years.

  But there was that folder on the shelf looking at me. And there was Agnes, before me in my mind, setting her face to go. When I looked down at my hands, they were oddly steady, my palms dry as the first day I walked up those wide stone steps to the mayor’s house.