All the Children Are Home

by Patry Francis

  “Damn. I forgot how hot it was up here. What are you plannin’ to write—a sequel to that book in your room? What’s it called—Dante’s Inferno?” He pronounced the name as if it rhymed with ant.

  “It’s Dan-tay,” I laughed. “You know—Italiano? You should read it sometime.”

  “Yeah, I was thinkin’ of it, but then I decided I’d save myself the trouble and take the trip myself. Some of the things I seen, Z? Bet I could teach old Mr. Dan-tayy a thing or two about infernos.” He circled the shadowy space, kicking at the boxes that littered the floor. “Sure is a lot of crap up here. Whaddya think Ma’s savin’ in all of these?”

  “Probably the story of every kid that ever came through the house. I hardly dare to look.”

  “Talk about infernos. Open one and the whole place’ll go up in flames.” He drew an explosion with his hands. In its wake, we fell quiet, thinking of the kids we’d called brother or sister for a month or a year, the ones whose report cards and school pictures had been meticulously saved just like ours. Now we watched for their names in the paper. One of Ma’s twins played football for the high school team; he came by to say goodbye before he headed out to Ohio on a scholarship. We saw a couple of their names on the wedding page, too, and several of them were listed among those who had joined the military. When we spotted a familiar name in the court report, however, we hid the paper from Ma.

  “You didn’t really hurt your back, did you?” I finally asked.

  Jimmy clutched his lower spine and deepened his voice in a perfect imitation of Dad’s. “Get the heating pad, Dahlia. I really did it this time.”

  Then he settled himself on an empty crate and swatted at a network of spider webs as he surveyed the dim lighting, the nails protruding from the unfinished walls.

  “You gonna tell me why you wanted to move up here? Like I said, this place is hotter than Dante’s worst nightmare. Haunted, too.” Looking at the crates in the corner, he made a cross of his hands as if to repel a vampire.

  I reached for the broom, hoping to give him a hint. “Charlie and I have plans to meet at Junie Sweet’s in an hour and I want to get the place cleaned up before I go.”

  He didn’t budge. “You still haven’t answered my question.”

  “What—?” I avoided his eyes. And then, when he continued to stare at me, “No big mystery. I just wanted some quiet; that’s all.”

  “Quiet?” Jimmy pronounced the word like a curse. He peered into a corner of the attic where Jon’s train lay in a heap of broken tracks. “Ask me, the place has been quiet since Shad left. Everyone thinks my nightmares started after the war. But the first time I woke up shakin’ was the night that bastard took him away.”

  Then, remembering who Michael Finn was to me, he quickly added, “Sorry, Z. Sometimes I’m just an asshole.”

  “It’s okay. You called him by the right name.”

  “Maybe so, but bastards or not, bums or not, they’re still a part of us, ain’t they? That’s somethin’ people don’t understand. Even Ma and Dad didn’t get it for a long time.”

  “And they do now?”

  “Yeah, they do. Since I come home, they been forced to look at a lot of stuff they never seen before.”

  His eyes drifted back to the train we thought they’d thrown away. “I used to hear that damn thing runnin’ in my sleep. When I woke up, the silence practically kilt me. You wanna know why I started blastin’ that music Ma and Dad are always complaining about? I wanted somethin’ to drown out the quiet he left behind. Part of the reason, anyway.”

  My eyes moved from the abandoned train to Jimmy’s face. Sometimes I forgot that I wasn’t the only one who’d been affected by Jon’s abrupt disappearance.

  “And now that you’re busy with the Ultimate Colleige and Sky Bar spends half her life at the pool, the place is a damn tomb,” he went on. “Whaddya think it’ll be like with the both of yas gone?”

  “You’re not here much yourself these days, you know. By the time Agnes leaves for college, you and Jane will probably be married.”

  His eyes took on that dreamy look they always got whenever he heard his girlfriend’s name. “She’d look pretty damn cute in one of them white dresses, wouldn’t she? Diamond ring sparklin’ on her finger like a little piece of the sun? Man. Do you really think she’d ever . . . to me, Z?” Then he shook his head. “Nah. Let’s not talk crazy.”

  A COUPLE OF years earlier, I would have agreed. The thought of my brother and Judge Miller’s stepdaughter going to a movie together, much less getting married, seemed about as likely as life on Mars. Even Jimmy had given up, though occasionally we still caught him dialing the number. “Just an old reflex,” he’d say, looking embarrassed. “Not like I expect her to talk to me.”

  The Millers weren’t even trying to be polite by then. “Jimmy Kovacs, is that you? How many times do you have to be told?”

  “Seventy times seven. Ain’t that what they say in the Book?” Jimmy said into the dead phone after they hung up on him.

  “You already called that many times, son. At least,” Dad said from his armchair. “And I don’t think the prophets were talkin’ about chasin’ girls when they wrote that.”

  I still remember the day Jane left for college in New York. It was only weeks before Jimmy would be leaving himself—boarding the bus for boot camp.

  “Just hope whatever colleige ends up with her knows what he got,” he said, gazing out the picture window. “That girl deserves . . .” He drew increasingly large circles with his hand. “Everything.”

  “So do you, Jim,” Ma quickly put in. “Don’t ever forget that.”

  He kissed her on the head before heading off to who-knows-where. “Accordin’ to my Ma, anyways.” Though she’d been telling him all his life—we all had—somehow he never seemed to believe it.

  Jimmy was on a base in California and was preparing to leave for Vietnam when the news hit town: Jane Miller had left school and disappeared. Some said she’d been trundled off to a home for unwed mothers; others claimed it was an abortion in someone’s garage, followed by a nervous breakdown. Still others believed she’d run off and eloped, causing her family to disown her. I did my best to ignore the subject whenever it came up.

  Then, just when everyone had almost forgotten her, she was back in town, waitressing at Rusty’s Hideaway on the south side. Jane had always had an edgy side, but now her old friends described her as downright hard. If anyone asked where she’d been, she was quick to tell them off in language that confirmed their worst suspicions.

  Again, the rumors started. Those who knew her father’s harsh reputation in the courtroom speculated that he was punishing her by refusing to pay her tuition. If she wanted to go back to school, she’d have to earn it, the Millers’ elderly neighbors said. But according to Jane’s friends, it went deeper than that. “It’s all her,” Allison Hillman was heard saying at Junie Sweet’s. “After what her parents made her do, she’s rebelling against everything. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite—”

  I walked out before she could finish the cliché, not wanting to hear the inevitable buzz about what exactly Jane Miller had been forced to do. To be honest, I couldn’t imagine that girl being pressured into anything.

  Then one morning I walked out the door and found her waiting for me. Despite everything I’d heard, I was shocked by the sight of her. The planes of her narrow face were sharper than ever and there was something steely in her eyes. I pretended not to see her, but she fell into step beside me.

  We walked the three miles without saying a word. Only when the school came into view did she break the silence. “So I hear your brother’s over in Nam.”

  I thought of all the times she’d refused his calls. The look on his face when he stood in the foyer holding that dead phone. Eyes straight ahead, I walked faster, joining the crowd that was headed for the door.

  She scrabbled to keep up. “Listen, Zaida, I know you don’t want to talk to me, and that’s fine cause I don’t have a
lot to say to you, either. Just give me the address and I’ll be out of your hair for good.”

  “Why—so you can play with his heart one more time? Not a chance.” While heads turned, I slipped into the high school, leaving her on the stairs.

  SHE WAS STILL outside when school ended six hours later. Only sheer aggravation made me stop. “Have you been out here waiting for me all day?”

  “I took a lunch break.” She looked at me obliquely as she lit a cigarette.

  “Well, you should have stayed home because—”

  “You wanna know one thing I learned from your brother?” She inhaled a long, slow drag and exhaled as if she was releasing much more than smoke. “Persistence.” Was it me, or did I hear a catch in her voice when she mentioned him?

  “You don’t even know Jimmy. If you could have seen—” I stopped myself, unwilling to give her the satisfaction. “Listen, the Gazette prints the names of soldiers who want mail every Wednesday if you’re looking for a pen pal . . .”

  She stopped abruptly. “You wanna know how we met?”

  “You were in the same graduating class, for crying out loud. You saw each other around all your lives—just like everyone else. Like I said—”

  She flashed the tiny flame of her cigarette. “It was ninth grade and I had just started smoking. Maybe that was the first sign I’d turn out—well, like I did. Neither of my sisters would have thought of picking up one of these nasty Camels. But I was, you know, the black sheep. From birth, you might say. I might’ve lived in the Millers’ house, but hard as my mother tried, hell, hard as I tried myself, I could never be like them.

  “Anyway, before homeroom, I’d sneak outside for a smoke by the dumpster—and there he was. That’s when it started.”

  “You and Jimmy talked?” All this time, I’d thought it was some inexplicable out-of-the-blue crush.

  “Every day. At first, that kid Jools was with him, but once we started hitting it off, Jimmy made sure to come alone. Some of the best conversations I ever had were over my morning smoke. After he dropped out, I missed him like crazy—though I never admitted it.”

  “So why didn’t you take his calls if he meant so much to you?”

  “Half the time my parents never told me he called. And the other half—well, the one thing I did right was get good grades. College was my ticket out. The last thing I needed was some local kid, a Moscatelli no less, holding me back. I mean, no offense . . .”

  “Leave my brother alone,” I repeated as I picked up the pace. She moved in front of me, blocking my path.

  “It’s not like I want to go out with him or anything, Zaida. That hasn’t changed. But the past year, I had a lot of time to . . . think . . . and my mind kept going back to Jimmy. Sometimes it seemed like no one ever cared about me—me, the real Jane Miller—like that kid by the dumpster did—and I don’t just mean as a girl. Is that weird or what?” She shrugged her bony shoulders. “Least I could do is write him a letter or two.”

  I lowered my book bag and stared at her. “Persistence, huh? So you’re saying if I don’t give you the address, you’ll be outside my door tomorrow morning?”

  She gave me her hard smile, revealing teeth perfected by braces. “And the day after that. Seventy times seven.”

  So he’d even shared his favorite aphorism from the Bible with her? I pulled out a notebook. “Just promise you’re not gonna make him think—”

  “We’re friends, I told you. Even Jimmy knows that.”

  After I scribbled the military address, she looked it over—almost like she didn’t trust me. Then she jammed it into her pocketbook and walked away without even a See ya later.

  When Charlie caught up to me, I was still fuming. “What my brother ever saw in that girl, I’ll never know. And she’s rude to boot!”

  Charlie looked back at her narrow bottom, the thin hair pulled into a ponytail streaking out behind her as she turned a corner. “Beats me.”

  JIMMY’S LETTERS HOME had grown shorter and more obtuse as his tour wound down, and if Jane wrote to him, he didn’t mention it. He did his best to keep it upbeat and “normal” for Ma and Dad—Agnes even—but when he wrote to me, I heard a Jimmy I didn’t know. The last letter consisted of three lines in the center of the tissuey paper. No heading or signature.

  maybe we are all just figments of our own imagination. did you ever think of that, Z? stop believing in yourself for even a minute, and poof—you’re gone.

  It was the kind of philosophical stuff I would later hear in college, usually late at night after a few joints had been passed around. But not from my brother. Never from my brother. Though I carried the letter around for days, the only one I showed it to was Charlie. He read the lines over a few times before he handed it back. The sympathy in his eyes was unmistakable.

  “So? What do you think?” I finally asked.

  “I hear there’s a lot of drugs over there. And—I mean, you can hardly blame him. It’s gotta be hell.” He circled my wrist with his finger. “I’m sorry, Zaidie.”

  But by then, my mind was racing. Was that it? Had Jimmy become a dope fiend, like they said of Agnes’s mother? I shuddered. Besides death, it was the only affliction I knew that was powerful enough to keep a mother from her own children. I hid the letter in the back of my closet so Ma wouldn’t see it. Just like Agnes stored her treasures.

  What’s that supposed to mean, Jimmy? Are you okay? I eventually wrote back.

  Then, realizing what a ridiculous question it was, I scrapped it and began again. Turned out it didn’t matter. He was home before he received another letter.

  When there were no tracks on his arms like I’d feared, I began to wonder if I was wrong: Maybe there were scourges worse than dope. The only time he seemed anything like his old self was when he was leaving for Jools’s. Though we knew they would be drinking, we were almost relieved. “At least he’s interested in something,” Agnes said. The next day, though, his mood was blacker than ever.

  I expected he’d call Jane—no matter how friendly she kept her letters. Probably become a regular at Rusty’s Hideway, too, but he never mentioned her.

  Finally, one summer day when I found him wrapped in an afghan on the couch, I couldn’t hold back any longer. “Aren’t you supposed to be at—”

  “Ain’t nowhere I gotta be, Z. Nowhere in this entire world.” He was staring at the TV screen, though he clearly wasn’t focused on the game show. “Think you can get me a Coke out of the fridge? I’m feelin’ a little . . . under the weather.”

  I cracked the green bottle and set it on the table beside him, feeling desperate. “Maybe you should call that girl—what’s her name? The one who asked for your address?”

  “Jane Miller?” He drank his Coke slowly, his mind clearly elsewhere. “You know, she wrote to me almost every day. Letters almost as long as yours, too. Still got every one of ’em up in my room.”

  “So why don’t you—”

  Jimmy wrapped the afghan around himself tighter and lay back down. “Last thing that girl needs in her life is someone like me—even if she was a little bit interested. Which she ain’t.”

  THINGS HAD CHANGED since he’d started at the N. P., though. It wasn’t as if the problems disappeared, but Mr. O’Connor—or Saint Joe, as people around town mockingly called him—had us believing again. If you could stumble a couple of feet toward what you were meant to be one day, who knows where you might end up in a month? Or a year.

  “Reason most of us are miserable is cause we think we gotta figure everything out, get it all right,” Joe would say, not caring a bit if he was mocked. “But truth is it’s always gonna be screwed up and we’re never gonna understand it. All we gotta do is get through the day the best we can. And trust. That’s it!” By that point, his hands would be in the air, he’d be smiling like crazy, his cottony hair standing around his head, making it almost impossible not to listen.

  Sure, Jimmy still woke up with the crashing nightmares a couple of times a week, which meant t
hat soon he’d be out late with Jools. And after those nights by Buskit’s River he still had a hard time getting up for work. But if he didn’t show, Joe Jr. would come and bang on the door. “Like he was trying to wake the dead,” according to Ethel Sylvia, the neighbor who’d moved into Josie Pennypacker’s place. And in a way, he was. When that didn’t work—as it inevitably didn’t—Junior would march up and down the sidewalk, fearlessly crossing and recrossing the maledizione as he sang out the number of minutes they were late. “Thirty-eight minutes late for work, Jimmy Kovacs! Thirty-nine minutes. Got to get to work, Jimmy. Forty-one minutes late! Got to go to the Nothing’s Perfect Market and Deli and sweep the floor. Say hello to the customers. Smile. Be polite.” Here he began arguing with himself. “I won’t. Don’t have to. Forty-three minutes, Jimmy Kovacs! . . .”

  That went on until Ma and Ethel were both screaming with him. “Damnit, Jimmy! Get the hell up for work!”

  “Joe Jr. thinks he’s Paul Revere,” Ma said at supper as she and Dad developed a new routine. “The only thing he needs is the bell.”

  “Don’t give him any ideas,” Dad added.

  When Jimmy asked, Joe hired Jools, too, and before long, Joe Jr. was stopping at the house by the river after he left our place. “Gotta be clean for the work. Wash your shirt. Underwear, too. No one ever got bit by a bar of soap, Jools Bousquet! Gotta be clean for . . .”

  I’d been subtly trying to tell Jools the same thing for years, but there was nothing quite like Joe Jr. marching up and down in front of your house reminding you to take a bath to get your attention. Eventually, at the sight of him rounding the corner, Jools opened the window to yell, “Awwright, I hear ya!” The next sound coming through the window was the shower running. Without missing a beat, Junior continued on his way. “Gotta sweep the floor. Smile. Be polite to the customers. I won’t. Don’t have to . . .”

  Then one day when I stopped into the N. P., as we kids called it, I noticed Jools’s old sketches of Buskit’s River hanging on the wall. They were matted and framed as if they were in a gallery. Behind the register, Jools’s face couldn’t decide whether to be proud or embarrassed.