“They didn’t know about that thing Ma read in her book—failure to thrive? It’s what happens when no one ever talks to you or holds you. I didn’t even learn to talk right till I came to the Moscatellis. How could they say—”
“Yes, there’s mention of your growth problem and you were also labeled slow—obviously wrong. But the case of Maud-Marie—that was different. There were tests, visits to various doctors.”
She closed the file. “I’m sorry, Agnes. I know it’s not what you want to hear, and the Deans were certainly insensitive. After you were placed in their care, Maud-Marie was taken to St. Bridget’s Home for the Mentally Disabled in the western part of the state.” I wanted to shout that they were wrong—all of them, but as I sunk into my seat, a memory—fuzzy and long buried—surfaced. Mau Mau flailing wildly and screaming, whipping her head back and forth while I tried to comfort her. Maybe it was when we were leaving one home to go to another. Or when they took her somewhere without me. To one of those doctor visits perhaps.
There was another memory, too. Someone telling me that there was nothing we could do but forget. Though I could remember the sorrow in her voice, I still couldn’t see who it was. Ma? One of those foster mothers who called me good-natured but slow? Or was it her—the one who had given birth to us?
Unconsciously, my hand closed around the little jade elephant. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll take this after all.”
If I had it in me to cry, I would have woke the whole city with my wailing, but I was the stoic one. Mau Mau had howled for both of us. I put my hand in my pocket, held on to my elephant as tight as I could, and walked straight home. No looking to the left or right, no looking back.
When I got to the house, I would put the elephant in the cigar box with my mother’s presents and the stone I had retrieved from Jimmy’s bureau the day he was sentenced, the one Ma gave him when he first went to high school. To me it was what Julie Rocher saw in her feather: the fragility of hope. And its strength.
As for the elephant, that was the promise I made to my sister. No matter if the whole world already forgot her, I wouldn’t. Never.
Chapter Seventeen
The Last Brave Thing I Ever Did
DAHLIA
BY THE TIME I VISITED JIMMY, THEY’D TRANSFERRED HIM UP TO Lovell—the same prison where Silas was sent. At the time, thinking of my tormenter in a cell must have brought some satisfaction. I don’t remember much about those feelings, though, and walking through the doors, actually seeing those concrete walls . . . well, all that remained was the sorrow of it. And now, here was my Jimmy in the same place.
If I live to be a hundred and two, I’ll never forget how I felt that moment the guard brought him in, my heart galloping off without me. Or how he stopped short at the sight of me.
“Ma? Ma?” His eyes veered sharply from me to Louie. “What the hell, Dad? You coulda at least . . . Shit. Ma?”
It wasn’t what I expected. None of it. He sounded like he did when he first come home from the war, but it didn’t take long before all that anger showed itself for what it was and he started bawling. He didn’t even notice the fella to the right who had forgot his own visitors to laugh at him. The guard was saying something, too, but whatever it was, I couldn’t hear anything but Jimmy. My son.
The girls had tried to warn me.
“HOLD ON TO her hand, Dad,” Agnes told Lou the night before at supper. “Don’t let go no matter what.” Just like they had done, I thought.
Then Zaidie had wiped her mouth with her napkin. “He looks . . . different, too. It’s hard to explain, but when you see . . .”
“I wish we could be with you, but they only allow two visitors at a time.”
“You remember that picture of Joan of Arc I used to have on my wall?” Zaidie said. “Before I go through the door, I close my eyes and imagine I’m holding her shield in front of me.”
“I never in a million years thought I could walk to the end of the street,” I told them. “If I could do that—if I could sit you both down on that couch in there and tell you what I told you, well, then I suppose I could do just about anything.”
“Joan of Arc’s got nothing on Ma,” Agnes said, but I saw the flicker of concern in her eyes. She reached under the table and squeezed my hand.
Still, the sight of him in that jumpsuit, his face . . . well, nothing could’ve prepared me for it. For a minute, I thought I just might drop right there like Josie had. Or worse, let loose with every last tear I’d ever held back in my life.
But for Jimmy’s sake, I had to keep standing. I held on to Louie’s hand just like the girls told me, and imagined—not St. Joan and her shield—but them at my side the way they were when we walked deep into those places I thought I could never go. So close their shoulders were touching mine. By then, my face was wet, but I didn’t feel it until Louie reached into his pocket and handed me one of his hankies. Somehow the familiar scent of grease anchored me.
“What? When did you—how? Shit, Ma, is this one of those mirages?” Jimmy said before looking back to Louie. “Is she really here, Dad?”
Louie grunted—as if to say more might make him as emotional as Jimmy and me. “Yes, Jimmy,” I answered, my voice steadier than I believed possible. “I’m here.”
After we took our seats, him on one side of the plexiglass, us on the other, I told him how the girls had led me house by house back to my life, listing all the places I’d been. Jimmy kind of closed his eyes like he was traveling with me: the bank over on Westerly. The five-and-dime. And on the way home, a stop at the N. P.
“Joe Junior writes to me every damn day. I can’t believe he never said—”
“Your Ma made him promise,” Louie put in. “She wanted to surprise you.”
“Surprise? Jeez, you almost gave me a heart attack. And the way I started blubberin’ like a girl? I’ll be catching crap about that for weeks.”
“Junior’s got a new routine these days,” I went on. “Soon as he sees me, he steps out onto the sidewalk and makes an announcement, even though there’s usually no one there to hear it. ‘Mrs. Moscatelli’s here! Right here at the Nothing’s Perfect Market and Deli! Jimmy’s Ma!’ Between him and Jools, you’d think the queen had just dropped into the store.
“Nonna even dragged me to Junie Sweet’s one day and made me sit on a stool and order a cup of coffee. Course, with all the people gawking, and those tin-plated walls pressing in on me, my hands shook so bad I couldn’t drink it. The place hasn’t changed since I was in high school.”
“But you stayed?”
“You think Nonna would let me leave?” I launched into the impression I’d perfected over the years. “‘Leesen, Dah-li-a, no one looking at-a you, and iff-a they do? I speet on them. You hear me? I speet on every last-a one.’ Then she looked around, just daring someone to try it.”
Jimmy laughed. “Pray like crazy and don’t take shit from no one. That’s my Nonna.”
“So I suppose you heard about Agnes swimming in the nationals?” Louie asked after we all had a good chuckle.
“Have I heard? Damn, Dad, everyone in this godforsaken place knows about that. And they’re all rootin’ for her, too.” He turned to the guard in the corner. “Or else. Right, Roly?”
“That’s for sure,” the guard said, briefly dropping his stern demeanor. “And we all know about the sister accepted to all those fancy colleges, too—unless he’s putting us on. Z, right?”
“Tell him, Ma.” Jimmy crossed his arms in front of his chest. “Smartest girl in the damn state, our Z.”
“About to be the smartest in California, too,” Louie added. Almost in unison, we wagged our heads at the wonder of it.
“You never know, Ma. I might go to college myself someday just like you wanted,” Jimmy said. “Did Z tell you I’m studying for my diploma? Got me a real nice teacher name of Joan. Lady believes in everyone so much we can’t fail if we try.”
But then, a moment later, his face darkened. “I don’t suppos
e either of yous have seen Jane around?”
I gave a quick glance at Lou. We’d heard she quit her job at Rusty’s Hideaway, and there were rumors she’d returned to college, but we weren’t about to tell Jimmy any of that.
“She hasn’t been up?” I lifted my eyebrows, innocent as I could.
“Since I got here, my letters been coming back ‘address unknown’ just like the friggin’ song.” He slumped in his seat. “Probably for the best. Girl deserves the whole world like I always told you.”
I waited for Louie to speak up and say what he normally did when someone hurt one of his own: Well, the hell with her, then. But when he looked down at his hands, I rushed in to cover his silence.
“The right one will come along, Jim. Just wait.”
“In six years? Heck, Ma, I’ll be too old to care.” Then, seeing our stricken faces, he said, “Heck, I’m just teasing you guys.”
He turned to the guard. “With all my good behavior, I’ll be makin’ parole in no time. Right, Roly?”
Roly made a sound that reminded me of Louie’s grunts. A few minutes later, he reminded us that our time was up.
“Do ya think you might come back?” he asked, looking straight at me. “This ain’t like a one-shot deal?”
“We’ll be here, Jim. Every visiting day.”
Yes, he was different, like the girls warned me—bulked up, cocking his chin—as if he had a new awareness of what life was, as if at every moment one had to be prepared to fight. But I also saw the little boy I’d sent out with a lunch pail on the first day of school.
He had started out of the room, when all of a sudden he asked Roly to wait, there was one more thing he needed to ask. He stood there for a long minute, unable to get it out. Again he teared up.
Finally, the guard took his arm. “Okay, Kovacs.”
He shook him off. “So you did all that so you could come here? Leavin’ the house, walkin’ all over the damn town. You did it—for me, Ma?”
The question stopped me where I was, and it must have stopped the guard, too. He let him go.
“I did it for myself, Jim,” I finally said. “And because it was time.”
It was true, of course. But Jimmy was also right. The only thing he’d gotten wrong was the preposition. It wasn’t for, it was because. What we felt the day he came to us—the overwhelming love—it had opened us up to the whole world; to all the other kids who came after him. Though we didn’t know it that afternoon in the yard, right there in the dazzling sun, Jimmy Kovacs had become our because.
WITH TRAFFIC, IT was a two-hour ride home. There was nothing to fill it but the blaring of Louie’s horn. A couple of times he rolled down the window to yell, “Learn to drive, will ya?”
But no matter where we looked, whether it was the white line of the highway or the trees flying by like the brief minute that is our lives, we saw Jimmy’s face. And we saw the place where we left him. For once, I wished Louie had a radio in the car.
About an hour into our silent trip, something must have built up in him, too, though.
He cleared his throat.
“You want to know when I first decided I was going to marry you?”
I looked at him sideways. “Funny time to bring that up, isn’t it?” But after another stretch of mind-numbing quiet, I said, “You told me you noticed me in the high school auditorium when I was giving a speech.”
“Long before that, Dahlia. We were probably in sixth grade and you were wearing a blue dress with a lace collar.”
I touched my throat, remembering a dress my grandmother had made for my birthday. Too fancy for school, my mother said, but I loved that dress so much I wore it anyway.
“That was the day I noticed you. The day I set my mind on you—well, that happened much later.”
I removed my glasses and looked at him as if I’d never seen him before. “Do tell.” Louie paused to curse an old man dawdling in the passing lane before he went on.
“It was the morning you got up there and testified against Silas Wood. I remember the dress you had on that time, too. A dark green. Very plain, but nice just the same.”
I’d never spoken about that day. Never even allowed myself to think of it. And now Lou had me feeling the scratchy tag inside the neck of that new green dress? My mother’s tension when she flung the bag from Hanley’s onto my bed—I felt that, too. You’ll need something decent to wear.
After the afternoon we’d had, it was about the last thing I wanted to talk about. He probably would have dropped the subject, too—if I just stayed quiet. But somehow I couldn’t keep my peace.
“You were there, Lou? Good Lord, in all these years, you never told me . . .”
His eyes remained fixed on the road. “The whole town was against you. I figured you needed at least one person on your side.”
I closed my eyes, seeing that packed gallery, the sea of Woods and their allies. My mother and father were seated behind my lawyer, their faces contorted with shame when I desperately needed to see faith. But him—the man who would become the most important person in my life, the one who had always been on my side—he was still invisible to me.
“No, you didn’t see me, but I saw you, all right. Flesh, bone, and spirit, I saw you,” Louie said, as if he was privy to my thoughts. “Took a helluva lot of guts to get up there and tell that story. Straight through without breaking, you told it—even when his lawyer came at you the way he did. Well, that’s when I knew.”
“It was the last brave thing I ever did, Lou, and if I had any idea how it would turn out, most likely I wouldn’t’ve done it at all. So if that’s why you married me, you were duped.”
“Yes, you would have,” he said, like he knew me better than I knew myself.
“I was so young, Lou—a kid who thought courtrooms were where the guilty got punished and the innocent were set free. Hah.”
“But Silas was punished.”
“Not long. The conviction was overturned on appeal in less than a year. No, he never had to pay like I did. Or Bobby . . .” I gazed out the window, remembering everything I’d tried to bury. “Those days I was in the woods, when everyone was sure I was dead, they changed him.”
It was then that he’d written the first letter, hand-delivering it to our mailbox.
When I got out of the hospital, it was lying there on my bed—the only one I ever read. Course he blamed himself—just like I did for a while. Questioned everything from my ambitions to the audacity it took to say no to a Wood to my foolishness getting into the car that day.
I was so deep in memory Louie’s voice, when he spoke, startled me. “That was when Bobby enlisted, wasn’t it?”
“All the boys were signing up, but Bobby wouldn’t be eighteen till October, and he was supposed to go to college in the fall. Another thing the family cursed me for. The enlistment and . . . everything that followed.”
I could still see the screaming headline in the newspaper my mother dropped on the table that day:
MAYOR WOOD’S SON KILLED IN ACTION
Even in death, his father’s identity came before his own.
Again, my mind returned to that dining room the first time he brought me home. I no longer saw the elegant settings or the blindingly white smiles, but the dark weave of emotions beneath it all.
“AND HIS BEST friend there. What was his name? He paid a price, too. From what I remember, his old man lost his job—just because the boy told the truth.”
“Phil Gregory.” After all these years, I still said his name like it was something holy. “If anyone was brave in that courtroom, it was Phil. Can you remember the noise that broke out when the prosecutor called him to the stand?”
“What I remember was how straight he stood when he marched in, and how loud he spoke up. As if the whole courtroom was deaf.”
I nodded. “Most of them still are. But on that day, like it or not, they were forced to open their ears and hear. All of us were.”
“You know what else I remember? I reme
mber his father, nodding after every word, even though he had to know it would cost them. Him and his mother both.”
Again, something clenched up inside me. Oh yes, I remembered. It was what I’d wanted from my own family, but hadn’t gotten.
“I suppose that was where he got it—character—or whatever you want to call it. All I know is if it hadn’t been for Phil, there was no way in hell he would have been convicted. Not a Wood.”
“After his testimony, what choice did they have?”
We both fell quiet as we thought of the story Phil had told so loudly it filled the car twenty-eight years later. He described how a desperate Bobby had come to him a couple of hours before Silas picked me up in the car. Come to him and told him he’d overheard his brother planning something with his cousin and some kids from Boston. Something that was to happen that very day. He even knew the money those boys had been paid.
Fifty bucks apiece. Something about that detail shook me as much as anything else he said.
“And how did you respond?” the prosecutor asked Phil.
“I asked him why he was wasting time telling me. He needed to find Dahlia right away. Warn her.”
“What did Mr. Wood say to that?”
“He said he was afraid she’d go to the police. The chief was a friend of his father’s opponent in the upcoming race. If he did it—well, he’d be disowned. Or worse.”
“Worse?” the prosecutor prodded.
“‘They might hire someone to come after me the same way,’ Bobby said. Breaking family loyalty was considered the worst thing a Wood could do.”
By then the defense attorney was yelling hearsay.
Sustained.
Though it couldn’t be stricken from the jurors’ minds, Silas Wood still might have walked if that was all Phil had to say.
“Can you please tell the court what you did after Mr. Wood left you?”
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