“I’ll tell them to be ready.” I looked down at my puzzle like Jonas Salk peering into his microscope.
I SUPPOSE I might have sat in that chair, staring at those broken stars for the rest of my life, cups of half-drunk coffee growing mold around me, if it hadn’t been for Agnes. First she started missing practice and then she skipped supper.
“Just a cold,” she claimed, doing a poor imitation of a sniffle when I confronted her in her bed. That’s when I noticed she’d tacked the print from my puzzle above her bed. Maybe that damn picture cast a spell on the two of us, I thought, tempted to rip it down.
A couple of mornings later, I looked up and found her sitting in the straight-back chair Jimmy used as a kid when he helped me with my puzzles.
She picked up the box I propped in front of me as a guide. “You know where he was when he painted this?”
I waited for her to tell me.
“Looking out the window of an asylum.”
“That explains a lot. It looks like a five-year-old did it with crayons, for heaven’s sake. Why your dad ever thought I’d want something like this, I can’t imagine.”
“Actually, I was the one who picked it out,” she said. “Most kids at school don’t care much about this stuff, but there’s this one boy . . . he really loves that painting.”
I watched her slyly—noticing the secret pleasure she took in talking about this one boy. As if I didn’t know exactly who it was. I could almost hear them laughing in the driveway like they used to before the rides abruptly stopped. When I asked where Henry was these days, she said she didn’t want to talk about it.
“The guy went so crazy over a girl he cut off his own ear,” she continued. “May have been why he ended up in the asylum.”
“Another reason to throw the stupid thing in the trash. I’ve got enough problems myself without keeping company with a lunatic.”
She laughed for the first time since her cold had come on. “You make it sound like Vincent himself came in the puzzle box.”
“I’m not so sure he didn’t. That’s what those artist types do, you know—try to get in your brain, make you see the whole world like they do. You have to be careful with people like that.”
“Whatever was torturing him, he tamed it into a present to the world.” She stared into that cardboard picture, seeing much more than those stars.
“Hmph,” I said, blinking back at the puzzle. Was this her version of Nonna’s happy advice?
“So you’ve seen him, I gather,” I finally said, not looking at her.
“Who?” Now, my Agnes doesn’t go red like Zaida, but her color deepened just the same.
“The Starry Night boy. Who else?”
She buried her face in Flufferbell’s fur. “A couple of times he came to my practice. He didn’t sit on the bench and watch like he used to or anything. Just stood in the doorway a few minutes and left. And once when I was walking home, he stopped his car and asked if I wanted a ride—”
“Did you get in?”
“I told him I’d rather walk.”
“And—”
“He left me alone like I asked. Even avoids me at school,” she said miserably. “Then a week ago, he sent me the print. Just that. No note or anything.”
“So that was what brung on the cold.”
She was so lost in her own thoughts she didn’t hear me. Finally, she got up and began to meander up and down the parlor. “What happened to me, Ma?”
“No one ever said growing up was easy, my girl.”
“But you know I never cared about boys. Not like other girls, anyway. Not like Zaidie.” She almost sounded angry.
When the cat leaped from her arms and went to the door, I got up to let her out, grateful for a moment to think. Then I went back to my chair. The poor kid had never looked more confused.
She looked around the room as if searching for a place to escape.
I nodded slowly. “It’s that Dean fellow. He put you off men. Well—”
“It happened before that.” She eyed me warily, as if deciding whether it was safe to say more. Whatever she remembered of the years before she walked through the Deans’ door, we’d never spoke of it.
Go on, I told her with my eyes.
She pulled a wishbone from her pocket. It was so old it had turned white. “Last time I saw her, she gave me this.”
“Her?” I took a long look at that bone. “You mean, your mother?” I whispered, almost as if the woman was sleeping in the next room and I didn’t want to wake her. “It’s okay, Agnes. You can talk about her. I’m sorry if I ever made you think different.”
“She used to visit pretty regularly, but I hadn’t seen her for a while. And when she finally came, there was this man with her. Mr. Jackson, they told us to call him. Her new husband.”
“Us?”
“My sister and me. I knew right away he didn’t like us.”
“I seem to remember the file saying that after she got married, no one heard much from her.”
“She was so different that day. Even though she had her troubles, she always laughed when she was with us. Like I do, Ma. You know, really laughed. And when it was time to go, she always promised we’d be together and hugged us so hard she made us believe it. But that day, well, Mr. Jackson was so . . . in charge. She kept looking at him before she spoke to us, as if she had to get permission. When they were leaving, even her hug felt different—as if he was there in the middle of it. We waited to hear her laugh or to promise us she’d come again soon, but all she did was hand me this bone.”
I reached out and rested my hand on hers, wishing I could tell her not to count Henry out before they even got started. To say that no one had been more done with love and all the rest than me. And then that homely boy showed up at my door. But how could I? When I thought of Louie sleeping in Jimmy’s room, the door closing on me night after night, I felt my eyes tearing up. I took the wishbone that had been bleached by time and fingered it, thinking of everything her mother had wanted to give her, but didn’t—couldn’t—and I swiped at my eyes so she couldn’t see what I felt.
“All I want to do is swim, Ma. A boyfriend isn’t in the plan,” she said, reclaiming her wishbone. Unconsciously, we both turned toward the foyer and stared at the silent phone. When Agnes first started missing practice, Coach Lois had called every day. But Agnes had refused to come to the phone and now it seemed even the coach had given up. Again, there were things I wanted to say, but sometimes you say more by not speaking at all. Especially if you’re a mother.
“You want to know why I’ve been avoiding the pool? Every time I leave the Y, I think of that night. If I hadn’t called him, Ma, none of this would have happened. Jimmy would be home.”
“Oh, honey, how could you have known—”
She held up her hand, determined to go on. “It was what I’d always done when I was in trouble—turn to Jimmy. Ever since that night at supper when he told me he loved me. Even my own mother was afraid to say it. She said she didn’t deserve to till she took us back—”
“You know Dad and me—we loved you from the start; the both of us did. But we were still expecting your mother to come for you. Guess we were afraid, too. Just like she was.”
“It’s okay, Ma. I loved that it was Jimmy.”
And of course, I knew that was true. It didn’t matter that he was just a skinny kid himself; she believed him when he said he could protect her from Mr. Dean. Every time she was scared she’d run to his room and make him promise again, make him get out the bat and show her his swing. Then we’d hear them both laughing. I swear Mr. Dean got a little smaller every time he swung that bat.
Eventually it wasn’t just that bogeyman, Mr. Dean. It was anything that scared her. If she was worried about an algebra test or some kid didn’t invite her to their party, all she had to do was go to Jimmy and he’d take out his bat, tell her he’d take care of it.
Between that and his grin, Jimmy could crush any fear.
“I nev
er should have let it go on, though—especially after he came back from the war, after the nightmares started. And that night—”
“He wanted to be there, honey. That’s one thing he’s clear about. Jimmy said you were terrified when he saw your face lit up inside that booth. That’s why he went for the bat.”
“I was. Terrified. At first. But . . . but then I was something else. For the first time, I didn’t need Jimmy to protect me anymore.”
I watched her.
“Because he’d already shown me something better. He just didn’t know it,” she said, gulping breath the way she had when she was small and tried to run. “Do you remember the night he took me out in the backyard with a ball and a bat and taught me how to win? He was just trying to get me to go back to swim team, but when he sent that ball soaring, he taught me something else. Something most people never learn in their whole life.”
“I was out there that night. I didn’t hear him say—”
“I didn’t say he told me, Ma,” Agnes said. “I said he taught me. Winning’s never about what anyone else does. It’s something that happens between you and yourself. You don’t look to the left or the right. You just jump in the water and swim with everything you have. You swim for your life, Ma, and when you reach the finish line and look up, whoever you thought you were competing against is gone. Poof.”
“But what does that have to do with what happened on Penniman Street? With Mr. Dean?”
“Don’t you see, Ma? Since the first day I went to that house, Mr. Dean was the guy in the next lane. Even after I was safe with you and Dad and there was nothing he could do to me, he was still there.
“But that night on the street when he came toward me, I saw him for what he was—nothing but a coward and a bully. The weakest man I ever met in my life. He wouldn’t have dared to touch me—not now when I’m old enough to fight back, or worse—to tell. No, the only place he could hurt me was in my head. And when I looked at him and he looked at me that night on Penniman Street?” She paused dramatically, bringing me onto that dark road, the claustrophobia of that moment. “We both knew I was done with that.”
I got up and sat on a hassock directly facing my daughter. Then I took her two hands in my own, like I had so often hesitated to do.
“Do you know what all that means? You have to go back to school, Agnes. You have to swim, for heaven’s sake. It’s the least you can do for Jimmy, for all of us. You have to go back to your life.”
She stood up the way she did when she had a revelation to share, her face as bright as it must have been in that phone booth when she realized Mr. Dean could never hurt her again. “And so do you, Ma. I need you at my meets. And Jimmy . . . Do you really think you can stay away from him for six years?”
I attempted to jerk my hands away, but she refused to let me go.
“I’m—I’m sorry,” I stammered. “But this . . . this is my life right here. This house. You kids. My God, Agnes, you know I can’t—” In spite of myself, I started to cry. But still, still she held on to me.
“Yes, you can, Ma,” she said. “Just like Jimmy showed me. You can. Me and Zaidie are going to help you.”
Chapter Eleven
A Gun Appears in the Story
ZAIDIE
FOR THE THIRD TIME IN MY NEARLY EIGHTEEN YEARS, LIFE SPLIT into a jagged Before and After. Before Jimmy’s arrest, I’d been focused on graduation and preparing to leave for college. If I worried, it was about being separated from Charlie, who was going to school in Maine.
By then, we’d been together for two years and three months—practically a senior class record. On weekends, we parked his Mustang in Barkley’s Woods for hours, daring each other, daring ourselves to go a little further as the year wound down. For the rest of the week the spark of everything we weren’t supposed to do followed me, taking my breath at odd times, pulling me back to that dark car, the smell of leather seats, sandalwood cologne, and night.
Once in calculus—calculus!—I looked over at Charlie and thought of the last time we’d been together. His finger grazing my nipple. I flushed so bad that even Mr. Weintraub took notice.
He stopped the class. “Are you all right, Zaida?”
“Um, I feel like, uh . . . I think I’m coming down with something,” I stammered, the eyes of the class on me. “Can I see the nurse?”
The whole thing was turning me into a blathering idiot. Headed for Mrs. Bonner’s office, I could feel the heat on my face. She poked a thermometer in my mouth and looked at me skeptically: No fever.
She should only know.
THAT NIGHT ON the phone, Charlie talked to me in the low voice he sometimes used in the Mustang and I told him about the abandoned shack where older kids like my brother used to take their girlfriends, my untraceable fever rising. A storm had toppled a dead tree in the path and littered it with brush, but I was sure we could get there.
He got quiet for a moment. “When?” His voice curled around me like smoke. There was nothing wrong with it, I told myself. Charlie and I loved each other.
And after two years and all those nights in Barkley’s Woods, the moments when I was stopped by the memory of his mouth, his secret fierceness, there couldn’t be anything wrong with it. Well, could there?
Jimmy would have known the answer, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you discussed with your brother. Especially not a protective one like mine. And when I tried to tell Agnes, she just wrinkled up her nose and told me to talk to someone else; she wasn’t interested. She made it sound worse than Nonna or my friend Cynthia, who talked about Sin. Confession. Penance.
Not knowing where else to turn, I went out one night and sat in the alley outside Rusty’s Hideaway, where Jane waited tables. If anyone would understand, she would. Fair enough was the motto she’d adopted after her own bitter experience. Pronounced in her edgy way, eyes flashing left and right as if on the lookout for who-knew-what, it almost sounded like a threat.
Everything about her seemed different now—from her appearance to her speech patterns. These days she sounded more like a lifer at the factory than a judge’s daughter, or stepdaughter, as she always emphasized. Agnes and I suspected it was her way of getting back at her parents. Maybe Jimmy had been that for her, too—at least in the beginning. Fair enough.
“What are you doing here?” she said when she came out for her break. “I got fifteen minutes to eat supper and pull body and soul together for the rest of my shift. If you got somethin’ to say to me, this ain’t the time.”
“But it’s . . . it’s important, and I can’t talk about it at the house.”
She lit a cigarette and looked at me, annoyed, but maybe a little curious, too.
Undeterred, I blurted out everything—from how I felt that day in calculus to the plan to go to the shack. The whole ugly confusing knot of it.
Jane sat there on an old milk can, hunched over her cigarette. The only signs she was paying attention were the way her eyes shifted back and forth when I spoke and the restless tapping of her foot, which sped up when I got to something significant.
After her smoke, she wolfed down a cheese sandwich oozing French’s mustard while I shifted uncomfortably on my seat, wondering why I’d come. I didn’t even like Jane.
She consulted her watch. “I got three minutes before I’m due back on the floor.” I was about to leave when she wiped her mouth with her apron and told me to wait; she had something for me. Her cigarette was still burning. She returned with a small square packet. Instead of taking it, I shot her a puzzled look.
“You don’t even know a friggin’ rubber when you see one, do you?” she said. “Obviously, you need it more than I thought.”
“But I—” Feeling my color rising, I held it between two fingers, as if mere contact with the thing was dangerous. “I mean—we’re not going to do that . . .”
“Humor me, will ya? Put it in your pocketbook.” She took a couple more sweet puffs from her cigarette, mashed it out, and started inside.
I wanted to leave her disgusting Trojan right there. Sure, I might have gone a little too far with Charlie, I might even have liked it, but I wasn’t the type to need one of those. But for some reason, I dropped it back into my pocketbook. If nothing else, it would be fun to shock Cynthia.
“SO WHY ARE you still holding on to it?” Cynthia asked when I told her the story about Jane. We were sitting in her bedroom, surrounded by the same lilac wallpaper that had been on the wall since we were six. She reached for the tissue box she kept on her bureau. “Wrap it up and throw it away,” she ordered. “Now.”
Though it was what I intended to do, I wasn’t about to take orders from her. I closed my fist on the packet.
“Are you crazy? Someone might see it. Your ma, for instance, and—”
“And what?”
“Remember what Mr. Ryan said in English composition? If you introduce a gun in the beginning of the story, you’ll use it by the end. It’s a rule.”
“Chekhov said that, not Mr. Ryan. Besides, this isn’t a story, and that’s not a gun.” I dropped the packet back into my pocketbook. With the way things were progressing in Barkley’s Woods, though, and with Charlie pressuring me about the shack, I wasn’t so sure.
I had other things on my mind, though. That day, I was picking up my perfect prom dress. Unlike the flowing pastels everyone else was wearing, this one was a sleek deep purple. Agnes said it was almost the color of my eyes when I was excited about something. But the real reason I loved it was because it reminded me of the sky that entered our room when we had our best talks.
AS IT TURNED out, though, the dress would sit in the closet, draped in its plastic bag, unworn on prom night. I blamed Mr. Dean for my breakup with Charlie, my spoiled graduation—and for just about everything else that had gone wrong in our family. It wasn’t only the horrible things he’d done to Agnes when she was little or the sly torment she endured for years; I didn’t just hate him for trailing her home from practice (why, why?) or for walking toward that glowing phone booth on the night Jimmy’s life was ruined. The damage, the threat had rippled through all of us from the first day Agnes stood in the picture window, watching for his car. As I’d learned in Saturday school, one small act of goodness spreads outward, leading to untold benefits, as did the opposite.
All the Children Are Home Page 25
