“When did the Juneaus start growing that?” I said—as if it was all their fault. The whisper I heard, the breeze on my neck as if Bobby had come back to nuzzle me one more time. All the things I could never tell anyone.
“The Juneaus?” Agnes said.
I took in the name on the mailbox: ANDREWS. “Hmph.” I kept walking, touching the stone wall as I passed. “Well, at least the rocks haven’t changed.”
Even Dahlia’s Place—renamed Cafe Roma after my family sold it—had turned into Sheehan’s Irish Pub. But walking past it, I still inhaled the pungent scent of my mother’s marinara; I felt myself at fifteen or sixteen, pushing through the door in my work shoes, putting on the green apron in the back, joking with the customers as I bussed tables. I took a deep breath, filling my nostrils with the stench of stale beer and something else—a jolt of my old strength.
“Someday soon you’ll go anywhere in the city without thinking twice,” Zaidie said. “And you won’t even need us.”
“But we’ll be there if you do,” Agnes quickly added.
“Hmph.”
The first few steps away from the house were always the hardest, but the further I got from the maledizione, the easier it got. For thirty-four days I kept going, even when I was sure I couldn’t. One house and then another, one step, one heartbeat . . . The girls tugged me along with their voices, their faith, like I was a damn toddler.
“You’re doing good, Ma! Great! Just a few more feet. One more house. Yay!”
“You did it!”
Dear Lord.
I had made it six blocks and two houses from home when on the thirty-fifth day I came upon a sign halfway up Maple Street. A nice green sign painted in gold lettering with a border to match:
SILAS P. WOOD, C.P.A.
If the girls weren’t there to hold me up, I tell you I would have dropped on the spot. It must have been five minutes before I was able to speak. “Silas? W-when did he come back to town?”
“That’s been there long as I can remember,” Agnes stammered, shooting her sister a confused look. “We’re so used to seeing it, I guess we don’t even notice it anymore.”
“Silas Wood,” Zaida interrupted. “That’s Larry’s dad, isn’t it?”
“I think so.” Agnes then clamped her mouth shut, but not before I caught the glance that passed between them.
“Larry?” I repeated.
“A kid who was in school with Jimmy,” Zaida said, knowing I wouldn’t dare to ask further.
When I felt myself beginning to shake, Agnes took my hand. “We should go back,” she said. “She’s had enough, Zaidie.”
“Yes, I need . . . to go home.” Why, oh why had I ever let them talk me into this?
But Zaidie remained unmoving as she spoke to Agnes like I wasn’t there. “If we go home now, you know what’s gonna happen? She’ll never cross the porch again.” Finally, she faced me, hands on her hips and all: “Then you know what happens?” She cocked her head at the sign. “They win.”
I jerked my hand away from Agnes, trembling even harder. “Dear God, Zaida, don’t you understand anything? They already won. Twenty-nine years ago, they took everything I had. And then some. I was foolish to think I could—”
When Zaida shook her head, I remembered the vocabulary word from my old Reader’s Digest quiz that always made me think of her: implacable. Yes, that was her, all right. Implacable. And merciless. Heaven help me.
“That’s not how it works, Ma,” she said. “People don’t just beat you once. They come back to do it over and over. In your case, every single day for the last twenty-nine years. Till now, that is.”
“You don’t understand,” I repeated. “I need to go—”
“No, Ma. You’re the one who doesn’t understand.” Zaida’s voice lowered to almost a whisper. “Do you know how many times Frankenstein’s Texaco’s been vandalized?”
“That’s—that’s . . . not true. Louie would have—”
“Oh, he would have? Do you think Dad tells you about half the crap he takes? Half the stuff we kids . . .” Here she stopped herself, as if knowing she’d gone too far. “He’s been protecting you for as long as you’ve been married. We all have. But every year, at least once, the Woods make sure to remind us.”
I gaped at her. “Remind you? What are you talking about?”
“That they’re still winning.”
“This isn’t the time, Zaida,” I managed to say between gasping breaths. “Can’t you see I need—I need to go home.” I thought of the half-drunk cup I’d left on my card table that morning with an almost desperate longing.
“She’s right, Zaidie. We can—” Agnes said.
But again, the implacable one shook her head. “This is exactly the time. This is where we’ve been walking to every day without knowing it. This building. This moment.” She gestured at the sign before returning to me. “Come on, you still have four houses left to go.”
“Good Lord,” I said, reaching for Agnes. “Can’t she see—”
But something Agnes saw in Silas P. Wood, CPA’s window had caused her to turn.
Her eyes fixed, she let her hands fall to her side. “It’s only four more houses, Ma.”
“Agnes—I thought you understood.”
“I do, but you know what I see up there in that window? I see Silas Wood—him and Larry and his whole family, looking down at you. And not just you. Us,” Agnes said. “Dahlia Moscatelli and her crummy foster kids.”
“Stop, please, Agnes—”
“That’s what he thinks of us, Ma. What all those Woods think of us. Them and their friends, too. No matter what we do, we’ll always be nothing but low-life Moscatelli kids.”
“They’re sure you’ll turn back,” Zaidie added. “One glimpse of their mighty name and you’ll scurry home to your cell and slam the door. That’s what they think.”
“I told you, Zaida . . . I made my peace with that . . . I—” I squeezed my eyes shut.
But when I opened them, I was mysteriously drawn to the window the girls were forcing me to look into. It was empty, which was their real victory: They didn’t even have to be there to scare me away.
My anger steadied me. “You say Jimmy knew his boy—Larry?”
Agnes nodded. “Larry went away to college around the time Jimmy got sent to Vietnam, but Jools told us—” She paused, obviously worried how much I could handle.
“Go on. Jools told you what?” For a minute, I forgot everything, the six blocks I’d have to walk to get back home to my chair, the name etched in gold lettering.
Everything.
“Back when they were in school, Larry made Jimmy’s life pretty miserable; that’s all.”
Was that when Jimmy had become a rat? I wondered. Dear God, why hadn’t anyone told me?
“Like I said, winning isn’t something people like that do once,” Zaida added. “It’s something they do every day. They need it.”
“It’s their oxygen, Ma. Their life’s blood. Just like it was for Mr. Dean,” Agnes said. But when she looked me in the eye, she was no longer the frightened girl watching for the yellow car. She was Agnes, who could swim like a dolphin, and she was truly free.
“Imagine that,” I murmured to myself with something like awe. I glanced up the street toward the corner. “Four more houses, you say?”
Walking slightly ahead of the girls for the first time, I reached the third house and stopped abruptly. “Are the lions still there?”
“Lions?” The girls glanced at each other.
“You mean the statues in front of the old mayor’s mansion?” Agnes swiveled toward Zaida. “It’s a historical site now.”
“Yes, they’re there. Someday, we’ll—” Zaida began.
“No, not someday, Zaida. Today. Now.”
“It’s a good mile from here, Ma, and you’ve already walked pretty far.”
“You think I don’t know where it is?” I said. By then I had resumed walking. “I could practically tell you the number of h
eartbeats it takes to get there.”
“As long as you feel strong enough.” Zaida was a step behind me, with Agnes beside her.
“You said it right. If I don’t do it today, I’ll never set foot off the porch again.”
The girls thought I was driven by courage like they were. Like they had been their whole lives. They were wrong. They thought this determination was something that came over me when I looked at the Wood name in gold letters and didn’t blink. That was wrong, too.
What gave me my strength was the other name she’d said: Jimmy. And behind him were all the rest: Louie, Zaida, Agnes, Jon—even the kids who’d only been with us a few months. While I’d hid myself up in the house, the Woods had done their best to punish everyone I loved. I walked to the end of the street and turned left toward the west side like the place was on fire and I was the only one who could put it out.
Einstein or one of those types said that time bends; that sometimes an hour’s not an hour; it’s more like a minute. Other times it stretches into a week, or infinity.
Something of that nature. Well, that day, I, Dahlia Moscatelli, discovered distance is the same. A mile can be so far it might take a woman traveling by foot twenty-nine years to cross it—or so close that all she had to do was close her eyes, take a breath and she’s there.
I can’t explain it, but between the moment I stopped at the third house on Maple Street and the one when I found myself standing in front of those stone lions, I saw nothing; I smelled nothing; I didn’t even think anything.
I wished I could say I didn’t tremble when I saw the place, that my breath didn’t catch inside me when I looked up that long driveway to the house on the hill, but that would be a lie.
Sensing it, the girls came to my side. “Are you okay, Ma?” Agnes seized my hand.
“I’m going to call Dad and tell him to bring the car,” Zaidie said, merciful for once. “It’s a long walk back and you’re . . . you’re tired, Ma.”
Trapped in Mr. Einstein’s bendable universe, I hardly heard them. Hardly saw their anxious faces. What I saw was Bobby Wood, holding my hand, as we walked up that driveway for the first time. What I saw was the door to that magnificent house opening, and the family gathered around the dining room table.
You’re late, Robert, his father said. You almost missed grace. Though I could tell he wasn’t sure about me—not at all—his smile was an irresistible blaze.
When I finally looked away from that table, the handsome young boy was gone; I was a middle-aged woman with streaks of ash and snow in my hair, and good heavens, I was blubbering again.
“I knew we shouldn’t have come here,” Agnes said, her eyes full of the heartbreak she held close all these years but never released.
“It’s not your fault; it was me. I’m sorry, Ma. I just—I didn’t want Agnes and me to go away to college and leave you there, sitting in that chair.” The resolve on Zaida’s face was replaced with a watery mess of grief and makeup. “And Jimmy, he needs to see you.”
Though I wasn’t given to that sort of thing, I pulled her to me right there on the street and felt her heart, her sorrows, her mascaraed tears, but most of all, the great life force she always had, pulsating against mine.
“There, there, now,” I said, patting her back like it had all been a nightmare. Only this time I’d been the one living in a dark dream. “No more sorries. All you’ve done”—I paused to pull Agnes into our circle—“all the two of you have ever done since you come into the house was lead me back to myself.”
Then I stood apart from them, and wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, done with the coward.
THOSE TWO MILES home, we must have been a sight: A grown woman walking through the streets holding hands with her teenage daughters like she was lost or blind. Crazy Dahlia Moscatelli, people would say, talking about me like they did about Joe Jr. But I didn’t care who gawked. The truth, if they had eyes to see, was I’d never, in all my life, been less lost. Never less blind.
At home, my cold coffee was right where I’d left it. While the girls took their places on the couch, with Flufferbell a silent witness, I sat down on my chair and told them everything I’d kept to myself for twenty-nine years.
Chapter Fourteen
The Golden Tree
DAHLIA
SILAS WAS NOTHING LIKE THE REST OF THEM. IF HE HADN’T BEEN A Wood, the boy would have slipped through four years of high school unnoticed. Average to look at, not much of a student—and he had this, um, closed way about him. No personality, kids said, but I suppose that’s a personality, too, isn’t it?
The only reason he got picked for teams or invited to parties was because his brothers made sure of it. They were that way, the Woods—loyal to a fault. Here, I had to stop myself a minute. Yes.
He was only a year ahead of me at school, but the first time I ever paid him any mind was that Sunday Bobby brought me to dinner.
“To the mansion with the lions?” Agnes asked. I nodded.
What kills me is that even knowing everything that came of it, I’m still impressed when I think of that table—the sparkling glasses, gleaming silver, a tablecloth—on an ordinary Sunday. A maid serving the courses, for heaven’s sake! But mostly, I was dazzled by all the bright young faces glittering around it. Five sons, all destined to be SOMEONE; that’s what people said. As if the rest of us aren’t.
In my mind, I saw them all as clear as I had at sixteen. Michael, a college student in Boston who still came home every Sunday, my handsome Bobby, the one they called Ray Ray—he excelled at hockey—shy Calvin, who was soon to come into his own . . . and him. The closed-off one.
When the mayor asked about my plans for the future, they all jumped in—like I was the most fascinating girl they ever met, and nothing was more important than my plans. Later, I realized that had nothing to do with me. It was who they were, how they had seduced a city.
Meanwhile, Silas looked down, focused on the beef he was cutting into tiny squares. I was acutely aware of his presence, though. He cleared his throat a bit too loud a couple of times, but then said nothing. No one seemed to notice but me. And Mrs. Wood.
“Silas, dear, sit up straight,” she said, nervous, the way she’d been when they teased Calvin. A feeling I know myself as a mother.
He pushed back his chair, leaving that precisely cut plate of beef. “Can I be excused?”
Though he was speaking low, I felt the—what’s the word?—volatility—that was just below the surface in all of them. The mayor, too. He released him with the same look my mother sometimes gave me. Who knows? Maybe that’s why I was drawn to Bobby, why he was drawn to me. It was what I knew.
Anyway, it’s strange the things you remember. The way Silas cut his beef, the sound of him clearing his throat. Almost as if you know it’s significant long before you understand why. Or how. As if something warns you: Pay attention. This is going to matter. Hmm.
I suppose I felt sorry for him. I even tried to talk to him a few times when I ran into him at school, but he was always quick to get away.
“Silas is the mailman’s kid; that’s what Dad says,” Bobby told me once after his brother missed an easy shot in a game of pickup basketball. And when I asked if that hurt Silas’s feelings, the unpredictable anger flared.
“If there’s one thing a kid’s gotta learn, it’s how to take a joke.”
Was that something his father taught him? I wondered. Another Wood secret of success?
But before I could ask, Bobby got up and walked away—as he often did—abruptly leaving me to wonder what I’d said. Now, of course, I know it wasn’t anything I said. It was what I might say. The questions I might have asked, but never got the chance.
“But why did Silas matter? Bobby was your boyfriend,” Zaida said when I paused. “He’s the one in all those pictures up in the attic.”
I tensed up as I thought of them up there in the attic, going through my things.
How much had they seen? Obviously not enough to know
Silas’s part in it—but of course there were no pictures of that.
“You looked so happy, Ma,” Agnes added, as if to reassure me.
Happy? Hah. I took a belt of my coffee the way Louie does with his water. I suppose I was for a while; we both were—though things were never right. There was always this anger in him, this need to . . . squash me, it felt like, and it got worse the longer we were together. Still, what did I know? Bobby was the first and only boy I went with in high school.
He was jealous of my friends, of where I went, who I was, it seemed like. And after I got accepted to nursing school it escalated, until finally I got the courage to break up with him. It wasn’t easy, but somehow I managed to avoid him all summer. I’m telling you I never felt so free—so happy as I did that summer. Of course, the family was furious. The way they saw it I’d never been near good enough for Bobby, and yet they’d taken me in, encouraged me, even hired a tutor when I struggled with my chemistry. Who did I think I was? How dare I?
I was leaving for school in six days when it happened. Can you imagine? Six days and my entire life would have gone different. Both our lives.
I paused awhile before I went on.
Silas was the one who brought me out there, I began, knowing I didn’t have to explain. After the kids blamed me for letting Jon go and for allowing everything to go to ruin while I lay up in bed, Louie had tried to make them understand it wasn’t my fault. That I’d been left in the woods. That I hadn’t been right since they found me on the highway three days later. He even showed them the clippings from the newspaper.
I wasn’t there when they read it, of course, but I could see their faces just the same: Zaida’s eyes filling, Agnes turning in on herself. And Jimmy? Probably got up and walked out. It’s hard for boys to know what to do with those things. Later, when I saw the pity in them, I grilled Louie about how much he had said.
“I told them some boys . . . they took you out in the woods—and they hurt you, that’s all. They hurt you bad.”
I suppose he thought he was defending me, but I was outraged. And even madder that he’d reminded me of it. Crazy, isn’t it? Though it’s been with me every day since, I never let myself think of it.
All the Children Are Home Page 27
