“What’s any of this got to do with me—with us?” Charlie said the day I told him. “I’m sorry about your brother and everything, but do you have to wreck our senior year—wreck us? How’s that supposed to help?”
I looked at him sorrowfully. How could I explain that senior year just didn’t matter anymore? Or that after Jimmy was arrested, I was no longer sure I even wanted to go to college, much less the dumb senior parties. One day I’d decide to take a year off and stay home where I could visit Jimmy on Saturdays, maybe even see if Jane could get me a job at the Hideaway. The next I wanted to bolt as soon as I could. Leave for California and never come back.
“I wanted to tell you now so you’d have time to get another date,” I said. “I’m sure there’s lots of girls who would go—”
“Gee, thanks, Zaidie. That’s big of you.” He walked away shaking his head while I felt the tears rising up inside me.
THE ONLY ONE who understood was Agnes. Everywhere one of us went, someone seemed to be whispering behind their hands. Her brother, her brother . . . Or worse, something about the Moscatelli kids. As if we were all guilty.
Though Agnes had gone back to swimming—harder and faster than before, she claimed with bitter satisfaction—and I remained diligent in my studies, we spent our free time huddled in the house, sitting in the hole as if Princie were still alive and Jon and Jimmy crowded us on the couch. In some ways, though, I felt stronger than ever.
FINALLY, ONE NIGHT, just before six, I was driven out of the house where nothing was cooking on the stove, Ma moped over a puzzle she would never finish, and Dad refused to walk through the door when he was supposed to. That night even Agnes was out—probably with Henry. Though she hadn’t talked about him since I broke up with Charlie, I’d heard Caroline was going to the prom with someone from another school.
I walked faster, propelled by the confusion that swirled inside me day and night.
Just two days earlier, I’d convinced Jane to come with me to visit Jimmy. He barely spoke until we were ready to leave. Then he told us not to bother coming again.
“The hell, Jimmy,” Jane said, wavy lines appearing on her twenty-two-year-old forehead.
“You heard me. I don’t want no visitors.”
But it didn’t take long before he read our crestfallen expressions and the sweetest of the sweet resurfaced. “Don’t ya understand?” he said, his voice cracking. “It’s not that I don’t want to see yas. It’s just . . . the two of you? You don’t belong in a place like this.”
I tried to tell him that he didn’t, either, but he stopped me. “Everything they said I done, I done, Z. And in my head—more.”
Jane, however, wiped her eyes. “Fair enough.” The words seemed to mock all three of us.
So all of that was inside me the night I left the house—Jane’s tears—“Not angry tears, pissed-the-hell-off tears,” she called them, as if that was a whole different category of anger—and the defeat that rose off Jimmy’s skin. I had totally forgotten it was the night of the prom.
I swear I didn’t plan to end up outside Charlie’s house, but all of a sudden, it felt as if there was nowhere else to go. I tossed a rock at his second-floor window the way I used to. He lifted the shade, and then a few minutes later, appeared in the front door.
As soon as he came out, heck, probably before I left the house, I was crying. What could he do but wrap me up in his arms, his pale hair grazing my cheek, the smell of his skin—musk and grass—pulling me back to before faster than the speed of light?
“I wish I knew what to say, Zaidie,” he whispered. “I wish . . . I could make it go away.”
And when that made me cry harder, what could he do but kiss me? It was a light, consoling kiss at first. But when I kissed him in return, it quickly became the locus of all my confusion and hunger, a kiss that had forgotten nothing. I don’t know who suggested we take a walk, but I was the one who led us to the shack in the woods.
Sometimes I tell myself I didn’t plan for it to happen or want it to happen; it just did. By then, we both knew that what we had was over. That whether I went away to college or not, he would soon be gone. But more than that—I wasn’t the Zaidie he’d fallen for, the one who was still open-hearted enough to love him back.
But then I’m forced to remember the deliberateness with which we moved those trees out of the path, dragged away the brush, wrenched open the door. I’m forced to see him, taking off his jacket, then his shirt; how I touched the muscles of his chest before he laid his clothes across the plank bed where Richard J. Cartier had slept.
If anyone hesitated, it was Charlie. “Are you sure?” he said, taking my face in his hands. Though the light was dim, the mixture of fire and gentleness that had made me love him was in his eyes. “We don’t have to, you know—”
But it seemed we did. I reached into my pocketbook for the foil packet I’d carried around for months. Somewhere, Chekhov was laughing.
Chapter Twelve
A Basket of Stones
DAHLIA
THIS WAS HOW I DID IT: ONE HOUSE AT A TIME, WITH ZAIDIE ON one side of me, Agnes on the other, and a fool cat bringing up the rear. I carried a paper bag for the times I couldn’t breathe. Slow? My God, the first day it took me over an hour to make it past Josie Pennypacker’s old place. But wobbly as a baby learning to walk, heart thumping like Edmund Hillary scaling Everest, I reclaimed the street I lived on. The city—or you might as well say the world—because aside from my jigsaws, Claxton was it for me—had come into view.
There were days I started out so dizzy I was sure I’d collapse before I made it off the porch. “I got one of my migraines coming on,” I’d say, holding my head. “You want me to drop dead out here like poor Josie? Is that what you girls want?”
But they were merciless, those two. “Just to the corner today. Then you can go to bed the rest of the day if you want.” Zaidie tightened her grip on my arm till I felt a jolt of her determination.
Agnes nodded and held me fast on her side. “Remember what I told you, Ma. Don’t look to the right or left. Just keep swimming. And when you’re afraid?”
“Yeah, yeah, swim faster. Fine for you to say.” But somehow my feet kept moving. The only one who seemed to have any idea how I felt was Flufferbell, who opened her mouth wide as a lion and let out a fierce howl every day when I stepped off the porch.
At home, the girls tried to show me a textbook Mrs. Kelly had found for them at the library: Anxiety and Panic Disorders.
“Anxiety? Panic? For heaven’s sake, I don’t have anything like that,” I said, switching on the TV so they wouldn’t notice the red of my face. “And even if I did, your father’s right. When did those books Mrs. Kelly sent home ever help any of you?”
“In case you haven’t noticed, Agnes and I turned out pretty good,” Zaidie said. “Maybe we got more from you and your books than you know.”
I suppose that was meant as some kind of compliment, but all I heard was the first phrase: in case you haven’t noticed. Truth was I’d been so fixed on the boys, I’d noticed far less than I should have. Trying not to think about that, I made it to the next house, but by then I was shaking so bad a car slowed down to gawk at me.
“Since when is a woman walking down the damn street some kind of spectacle?” I yelled. When I turned to give them a good glare, who was it but Gina Lollobrigida. In full war paint, too.
“Good to see you out and about, Dahlia,” she called.
The strumpet. Even though the girls said she was just trying to be nice, I straightened myself up the best I could and pretended I didn’t hear.
“I told you to let me stay home,” I hollered at the merciless ones. “Now see what you’ve done? Even the likes of Gina Lollobrigida are laughing at me.”
“Keep going,” Zaidie said. Did I say they were merciless?
A minute later, I heard Agnes laughing. “Look, Ma. You got so mad at Gina Lollobrigida you went a whole house further than you were supposed to.”
> BY THE TIME I made it around the block, everything, including my own house, looked different.
“How long has it been since your dad painted this porch? It’s a sight,” I told the girls. The next day when Joe Jr. came by to deliver some of Anna’s meatballs, a new idea occurred to me.
“Run to Creeley’s and pick me up some paint for the porch, will you, Joe?” I told him. “A nice forest green. Tell him Louie will pay later. And two brushes, one for me and one for you.”
“Me—Joe O’Connor Jr.? Go to Creeley’s Paint Store?”
“Yes, you. I’ve got a job for you, Junior.”
He backed up—nervous as I was every day when I crossed the maledizione. “Can’t, Mrs. Moscatelli. Gotta work. At my job. Gotta work at the Nothing’s Perfect Market and Deli. Can’t. Gotta . . . At my job. Sweep the floor. Say hello. At the . . . Can’t, Mrs.—”
“I already asked your father,” I lied. “A nice forest green, and two brushes. I suppose we’ll need some of that turpentine, too. What do you think?”
Sensing he was about to repeat his spiel, I pulled out my ace. “Jimmy wants you to do it, Junior. He called from the jail just this morning and told me so.”
He looked at me skeptically. “Jimmy called—from the jail? Jimmy Kovacs?”
At first, I wasn’t sure he was buying it, but then he blinked. “Turpentine and a scraper and some sandpaper, Mrs. Moscatelli. We need sandpaper. And paint. A nice forest green.”
If he hadn’t paid the bill at the paint store, I might have thought Louie was unaware of my project. He didn’t even say a word when he come home and caught Joe and me scraping the porch.
Finally, a couple of days after we finished painting, I was forced to ask what he thought of the job.
He chomped his BLT like he didn’t hear me. I stared harder.
“You wanna know what I think, Dahlia? I think you better send Junior to the store for a ladder and a few gallons of white. Better learn how to climb it, too.”
“Climb a ladder—me? You know I’m scared of heights . . .”
“You’ll have to get over it, then. Cause all you done with that bright green porch is make the rest of the house look like hell.”
He got up and chucked his sandwich into the trash from halfway across the kitchen.
“Moscatelli sinks a three-pointer,” Agnes sang out.
I shot her a look. “Good Lord. Do you think this is some kind of sporting event?”
“Kind of,” Zaidie answered for her.
Louie had already slammed the door to Jimmy’s room by the time I’d recovered enough to follow him to the stairs.
“Maybe I will; just you watch!” I yelled. “And for the record, it’s not bright green. It’s a nice forest . . .” I heard Jimmy’s stereo switch on to drown me out. That music Louie always hated, too.
“The hell with you, then,” I hollered louder.
THE NEXT DAY, still peeved by his suggestion that I get on a ladder and paint the house, I walked past three extra houses before I noticed. Then, realizing what I’d done, I went a little further. “To hell with him,” I repeated to myself with every step.
Back at home, though, my eyes were drawn to the stones Louie had given me when he first came courting.
“Some fellas come with flowers, some bring candy,” I told the girls before they could escape. “That’s what your father brought me.”
“Dad gave you a basket of rocks? When you were dating?” Agnes asked gently, still thinking of the words that had powered my walk.
“Not all at once. One at a time, he brought them. Every day till the basket was filled.” Holy God, was I about to cry?
Though I knew they had things to do, they sat beside me on the couch and took my hands.
“It’s all right,” Agnes said, like I used to tell the kids when they had a bad dream.
But we both knew there were some things that could never be made all right. Not what Mr. Dean did to her in the attic. And not the three days I spent in the woods or anything that followed. The trial. The afternoon I watched my mother typing a letter to inform the Massachusetts General School of Nursing that I would not be a student there in the fall. Remembering, I felt every key in the typewriter pummeling my body. My parents’ faces at the supper table when people stopped coming into Dahlia’s Place. Fearful, dismayed, but most of all angry. It wasn’t long before that rage—mostly Mother’s—settled on me.
You couldn’t have kept quiet about it, could you? What did you accomplish, dragging it all out in the open, taking on the Woods of all people? Just ruined yourself and us, too.
The only peace I had was when they were forced to take jobs out of town. I didn’t tell the girls any of that, though. What was the point? I began with the day the story changed.
“I was home alone that afternoon. It was just a little after three—God knows why I looked at the clock, or why I remember—when Louie Moscatelli came to my front stoop and rung the bell.”
“Did you let him in?” Agnes asked.
“I wouldn’t have gone to the door for anyone back then—least of all Louie. I hardly knew the boy for one thing, and he was considered . . . something of a homely-looking fella at the time.”
“Considered? At the time?” The girls giggled. “People still call him Frankenstein, Ma.”
“After I heard him walk away, I went to the door to make sure he was good and gone. That’s when I found the first stone.”
“How did you know he left it? Or that it was for you?” Zaidie asked. “It might have been an ordinary rock from the garden.”
“I suppose I didn’t. Not at first. But when I picked it up, it was so smooth.”
I paused and passed a rock to each of them. “See? He’d polished them up in his shop. From then on, he showed up every day with another one. In the beginning, he rang the bell like the first day, but once he figured out I wasn’t going to answer, he stopped ringing. I’d hear him coming up the steps, then I’d wait a little while and go out to collect my rock.”
“So why’d you keep them?” Agnes said. “I mean, if you weren’t interested . . .”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” I figured this wasn’t the time to explain my theory of how Louie had come to me as mysteriously and purposefully as they had. I hadn’t asked for it, and I certainly didn’t recognize it when it came. But for some reason, I went to the basement and found a basket for the rocks he left behind.
“And then one day when I heard him on the porch, I looked out the window and found myself staring directly into that homely face—and seeing . . . seeing, well, my whole life, I suppose—though I didn’t know it at the time.”
“And then?” both girls said at once.
“What else could I do?” I laughed a bit for the first time since all the business with Jimmy. “I flung open the door and asked him what he wanted.”
“What on earth I wanted; that’s what you said,” Louie corrected from the foyer, where he had slipped in unheard.
I was about to ask him what he was doing home two hours early, but he went to the kitchen for a shot of water before I had a chance. And after supper, he headed straight to Jimmy’s room like he’d been doing. Something was different, though.
Halfway up the stairs, he stopped and looked at me on my chair. Soon as he caught me looking back, though, he cleared his throat and kept going.
It was long past midnight when I woke up and found him in bed—motionless, but awake. We lay there quiet for a few minutes.
“People been sayin’ they seen you, Dahlia,” he finally said. “Out walkin’ around the neighborhood. Far away as Grainer Street, someone seen you. Is it true?”
“Hmm . . .” I said, wondering if it was Gina Lollobrigida who’d stopped near the Grainer School. Somehow it didn’t seem like so much of a big deal as it used to. “You know what it’s like, Lou?”
He grunted.
“The walk you took that night after Jimmy . . . It wasn’t streets you were walking. It was like you were t
raveling up and down Jimmy’s whole life, looking for something. Except this is my life I’m walking.”
I paused, but he stayed quiet.
“We made it as far as Papa’s old restaurant this afternoon. Me and my girls.”
Louie grunted again.
“One of these days, you know what I’m gonna do, Lou? I’m gonna walk into that jail and see Jimmy.”
The sky was so black that night nothing in the room was visible, but I saw him just the same—hands folded behind his head. “You know the question you asked me at the door that first day?”
I chuckled to myself. “What you wanted.”
“What on earth I wanted,” he corrected again. “Well, in case I never answered you proper, this was it, Dahlia. The all and the everything of it. This was it.”
And then he reached for me.
Chapter Thirteen
Einstein and Me
DAHLIA
TURNS OUT THAT WHILE I HUDDLED INSIDE THE HOUSE, CONFINING the world to the shape of my picture window, nothing stayed put. Businesses changed names, houses were fiddled with till you could barely recognize them, lives and buildings were swept away, replaced by fields of glittering glass or markers in the graveyard. What shocked me most was the damn smell of the place. Even that was different.
“What’s that?” I asked, sniffing as I reached the corner of Hope Street. I didn’t realize I’d stopped to clutch my heart until the girls laughed.
“It’s honeysuckle, Ma. What did you think?” Zaidie picked me a sprig from the bush and attempted to press it to my face. I shoved the tender thing into my pocket and pulled away.
“Hah. Only time I ever smelled that was from a bottle.” I thought of the Muguet des Bois I splashed on myself in high school, Bobby leaning in to inhale my neck: Sweet, he said in my ear. I shuddered.
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