Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

by Laura Ruby

  “Frankie,” said Frankie, but Choppy was already walking toward the pantry.

  “Here, let me show you where we keep the rice and stuff.”

  Soon Frankie found out what Sister Vincenze meant by those “dietary restrictions.” Babies got good food because they were babies, nuns got good food because they were nuns, and everyone else got slop.

  “So okay, Fran-ces-ca. Hey, you listening? So this is what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna make some rice, okay? You take one of these big pots,” Choppy said, grabbing an enormous black pot by the handle and swinging it up underneath one of the spigots to fill it with water. “Here, feel how heavy it is.”

  Frankie tried to lift the pot herself, and almost dropped it to the floor.

  Choppy laughed. “It’s okay. You’ll get used to it. Soon you’ll be big as me.”

  “I don’t think so,” Frankie said. “You’re bigger than my father.” Frankie hoped she hadn’t insulted the other girl, but Choppy was hard to insult. She just laughed again.

  “Drag that bag of rice over here, little Fran-ces-ca,” she said.

  Frankie grabbed both corners of the bag of rice and dragged it across the kitchen floor. “Why do you keep calling me Francesca?”

  “Why not?” Choppy said. “So take this knife, see, and rip open the top of the bag, like this.”

  “Make sure you watch your fingers,” said Frankie.

  Choppy snickered again. “You’re a funny thing,” she said. “Okay. So when the water’s boiling, you use this measuring cup and scoop out some of the rice and dump it in the water. Then you cover it, wait forty-five minutes, and you got your rice. You got it?”

  “Sure,” Frankie said.

  “Then go to it.”

  While Choppy watched, Frankie pulled open the bag and shoved the measuring cup into the bag. As she scooped the rice, Frankie noticed something funny. Some of the rice grains were squirming.

  “Uh, Choppy?”

  “Yeah, Fran-ces-ca?”

  “This rice isn’t any good.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, look at it. I don’t think it’s supposed to move around by itself, you know?”

  Choppy squinted at the rice. “You got a few bugs, is all. Just those little white ones.”

  “So I guess I get another bag of rice?”

  “What?” Choppy laughed again, as if Frankie had made the funniest joke she ever heard. “No, you don’t get another bag of rice! This bag was donated by . . . uh . . . I don’t know who it was donated by, and we don’t got any more. This is it. Just go ahead and use it. The bugs will float up to the top. You just skim them off, okay?”

  Frankie stared at her, and once more, Choppy laughed. Frankie had never seen a person who laughed so much, especially about such things as chopped fingers and wormy rice. Choppy took the cup of rice out of Frankie’s hand and dumped it into the water. “Bye-bye, little buggies!” she said, in a singsongy sort of voice. She stirred the bug soup with a long wooden ladle. “See?” she said, pointing. “Already they’re floating up to the top. Those guys can’t last long in the hot water.”

  Frankie spent the next fifteen minutes skimming the bugs out of the pot, wondering how she was ever going to eat again. Then Choppy showed her how to make beef stew. The meat was glistening with knobs of fat, the potatoes like the dark rocks the kids kicked around the yard. They put up some Postum—no real coffee was served to the kids. Finally Frankie couldn’t take it.

  “How can they feed us this trash?” she said. “The stuff we pick out of the garbage looks better than this!”

  Choppy looked over her shoulder to see where Sister Vincenze had got herself to, but Sister was busy yelling at one of the other girls for spilling some sugar on the floor. Didn’t they know it was donated and they had not a grain to spare? Choppy motioned for Frankie to follow her to another section of the kitchen, the nuns’ section. “Take a gander,” she said, lifting the lid off a large pot. Some sort of rich brown meat simmered in its own juices, the smell of it enough to make Frankie woozy. Another pot held whipped potatoes. Beans as green as grass filled another. Choppy smiled a wicked smile that made her look like a carved pumpkin and picked up a spoon. “Of course, we gotta taste the food to make sure it’s cooked right, don’t we? Wouldn’t want nobody to eat food that’s turned.” She spooned up a fat cloud of potato and held it out to Frankie.

  Just as Frankie was putting that spoonful in her mouth, just as the taste of butter and salt exploded on her tongue, she heard a noise in the hallway right outside the kitchen. There was a yelp and a thud as a dark-haired boy was shoved through the door so hard he slid across the floor and ended up at her feet. When he turned his brown eyes up from under the brim of his cap, when he smiled—lips full, cheeks flushed—she felt like a mermaid spat onto shore, half naked, tail thrashing.

  Frankie sucked in a breath and inhaled the potatoes. She coughed and coughed, wondering how she’d ever be able to breathe again.

  Drowning

  ONCE, I’D KNOWN A BOY like that.

  I haven’t taken a breath since.

  The Crow Prince

  MY BOY WAS NAMED BENNO. The first syllable a kiss before the lips parted, pouted, and the second syllable fell like fruit. When I couldn’t sleep, I would say his name over and over again just to feel it in my mouth.

  Frankie’s boy was named Sam. Not that he had the time to introduce himself. There she was coughing up a storm, Choppy pounding on her back, while Sister Vincenze chased the boy around the kitchen, slapping him with a pot holder. He ran out the door, the hooligans who had pushed him laughing and whooping.

  “Are you all right?” Choppy asked Frankie, after they were gone and the coughing had died down.

  “Who was that?” Frankie said.

  “The boy? I think his name’s Sam. Why?”

  Frankie shrugged, and coughed some more. “No reason.”

  Choppy smiled a long, slow smile. “He is a pretty one.”

  “Pretty is for girls,” Frankie said, though she was wrong.

  “Handsome, then.”

  “Maybe,” Frankie said. Frankie didn’t know boys could be pretty or handsome or any of it. It didn’t seem possible, with their woolly pants, dirty faces, and big clown feet. She coughed some more, trying to hide her own face, which was damp and hot, as if she were hanging over a pot of lumpy stew.

  “Uh-oh,” said Choppy. “Looks like somebody’s going to have lots to say at confession this week.”

  “What do you mean? I didn’t do anything.”

  “Yet,” said Choppy.

  Frankie thought about the word “yet” as she hurried down the hall toward the infirmary a few weeks later. For such a small word, it felt a lot bigger. A lot heavier. It echoed in her ears and pulsed through her veins as she ran—yet, yet, yet. She ran so hard that she almost lost the package of food under her sweater. She tucked it in tighter, hoping no nuns would notice the bulge or hear the crinkle of the butcher paper. And she’d nearly made it to the infirmary, too, when she heard the voice.

  “Francesca Mazza!”

  She turned, gripping both her elbows around her stomach as if she were cold or maybe even had a bellyache. Sister George lurked in the dark hallway like a giant bat. She was holding something. A breadboard. Frankie didn’t want to know why.

  Sister rubbed her knuckles against the board. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m visiting Loretta in the infirmary. She has chicken pox. I won’t catch them because I already had them. I wanted to cheer her up.”

  “Who gave you permission to visit the infirmary at this hour?”

  “Sister Bert,” Frankie said.

  “Sister Bertina,” she corrected.

  “Sister Bertina,” Frankie said, exactly the same way Sister had.

  Sister squinted at Frankie, trying to figure out if Frankie was making a fool of her, which she wasn’t; anyone could see Frankie just wanted to get away and see Loretta. I could see it. Siste
r Bert said she could, and besides, it was a cold afternoon, just after supper, and what else did she have to do?

  “If Sister Bertina gave you permission, then I suppose I’ll let you go.” Sister stepped forward, her eyes like coals. “But don’t you think for a minute that I won’t ask her to make sure that you’re not sneaking around on your own.”

  Frankie stepped back, wishing she could be brave enough to stand her ground. “Yes, Sister.”

  “If I find out that you were lying to me, you’re going to wish that you never met me,” Sister said, which was a stupid thing to say, because Frankie didn’t know a single orphan who didn’t wish that they hadn’t met Sister George.

  “Yes, Sister.”

  Sister George held Frankie’s stare for a moment or two, then swept off down the hallway like some kind of queen or something. Frankie felt a headache brewing over her eyebrows. When she was a grown woman with a house of her own, she swore to herself, she would come back here wearing a beautiful suit and matching hat and shoes. White gloves, too. She would find Sister George and tell her exactly what she thought of her, which was that Sister was just a bully, no better than the boys who roamed the streets stealing little kids’ candy, and Frankie wouldn’t care if she had to say a million Hail Marys every confession for the rest of her life.

  “What took you so long?” Loretta said when Frankie finally made it to the infirmary. “I finished my book this morning and I’ve been bored out of my skull all day.” She scratched at the red scabs dotting her face.

  “They wouldn’t let me visit till now,” Frankie said. “And then, on my way up, I got caught by you-know-who.”

  “She has to be the worst nun in this whole place,” said Loretta.

  “That’s saying something.” Frankie glanced around to see if anyone was looking, and pulled the package out from under her shirt. “Here. I brought you this.”

  Loretta took the package and fingered the wrapping. Frankie had drawn a bunch of different kids with chicken pox all over it.

  “I love your drawings,” she said. “I bet one day they’ll be hanging up in museums.”

  Frankie didn’t know how a bunch of faces with chicken pox was going to end up in a museum. “Are you gonna open it or what?”

  “Keep your shirt on,” she said, unwrapping the paper, careful not to rip it. She gasped when she saw what was inside. “Oh, Frankie! How’d you get it?”

  “I have my ways,” Frankie said.

  “I could eat this in one whole bite,” Loretta said, “but I don’t want anyone to see me.” She looked over my shoulder to where Nurse Frieda and her aide, Beatriz, were taking the temperature of some other sick kids.

  Frankie moved closer to Loretta, blocking her from the nurse’s view. “How’s that?”

  “Perfect!” she said. She lifted the roast-beef sandwich from the package and bit down into it, her eyes nearly rolling back in her head. Frankie would have gotten her some cake, but Loretta wasn’t one for sweets as much as meat. Frankie wished she’d been able to get her some meatballs, but they didn’t cook things like that at the orphanage, not even for the nuns. But thinking of meatballs made her think of her father, of him moving away and leaving her and Toni. She pushed those thoughts right out of her mind. She thought about the boy instead. Sam. She wondered if she would ever get a chance to talk to him. And then she wondered what she would say. And then she wondered if she would be able to catch her breath long enough to say anything.

  She wondered about the word “yet.”

  “Frankie? Hello?”

  “What?” Frankie said.

  “You were staring off into space. You looked like Sister Bert, the way she gets when she’s reading one of her books. I think she reads more than I do.”

  “Not possible,” Frankie said. “What’s the book you finished this morning?”

  “Anne of Green Gables.”

  Frankie had no idea what a gable was, but she wasn’t going to ask. “What’s it about?”

  “An orphan.”

  “Why would you want to read about an orphan when you’ve got so many orphans right in front of you?” Frankie said.

  “She’s a different kind of orphan. She gets a home with some nice people, and . . .” She stopped talking and shook her head, as if she’d just said something she’d have to confess to. She had juice dripping down her chin. She wiped it off with her fingers, then licked them. “Delicious!”

  “I’m glad you like it, ’cause I’m probably gonna have to say a lot of Our Fathers.”

  Loretta smiled and took Frankie’s hand. “You’re the best.”

  Frankie looked down at their clasped hands. “What are you, my fella or something?”

  Loretta blushed, the rest of her skin reddening to match the chicken pox. She let go of Frankie’s hand and picked up the butcher paper like someone admiring a nice photograph. “Maybe you can get a job working for the pictures. You know, painting all those movie sets.”

  “Right,” Frankie said. “Maybe I’ll work for Mr. Walt Disney.”

  “Well, why not?”

  That seemed like a silly question to Frankie. More nuts than reading about some made-up orphan. “Because I’m a Guardians girl, that’s why.”

  “So? Why can’t a Guardians girl get a job working for Mr. Disney? What does he care where you been, as long as you can do what he wants?”

  “Why don’t I run for president while I’m at it?”

  Loretta raised an eyebrow. “I’m the one who’s sick and still I’m not so cranky as you are. Why are you so cranky?”

  Frankie couldn’t explain it. “I don’t know. Sorry.”

  “You’re cranky, I’m hot. I didn’t think I could be so hot in December, but I feel like I’m burning up. I keep trying to open this window. Help me, okay?”

  The two of them stood and pushed up on the sash, and the huge window squeaked open. Frankie had to hold on to the back of Loretta’s nightgown so that she didn’t fall out.

  Nurse Frieda didn’t notice, but Beatriz, her aide, barely older than Frankie and Loretta, hurried over to them. “What are you doing?” Beatriz said, voice low. With her dark eyes and skin, everyone thought Beatriz was Sicilian, like Frankie, something that Beatriz, whose family was from Mexico, didn’t bother to correct. She was also thick and lush everywhere—hair, lips, body. Frankie had seen plenty of senior boys gawking at her, wishing they were sick and that she’d be the girl to take care of them.

  Beatriz eased the window shut. After laying the back of her hand on top of Loretta’s forehead, she clucked her tongue. “You’re still warm, and you need rest. I think it’s about time for your friend to leave.”

  “Does she have to?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I’ll be back to visit you,” Frankie said.

  “You promise?”

  “Yeah. Hey, next time I’ll bring Stella with me. She can sing you a song and tell you about how wonderful she is.”

  “You mean her head’s gotten bigger?” said Loretta.

  Beatriz huffed, put her hands on her hips. “You two are going to get me in trouble with Nurse Frieda!”

  Frankie stood. “All right, all right, I’m leaving. Sister Bert said that she’d let us listen to the radio after dinner anyway, and I’m missing it.”

  Another thing on the long, long list of things that made Sister Bert better than Sister George was the radio. Sister Bert liked Inner Sanctum, The Shadow, and Fibber McGee and Molly as much as any of the girls. Every night, she’d put the radio on and they would all gather around it, gaping at it as if the characters would come bursting out of that brown box.

  Frankie ran into the senior girls’ cottage, expecting the usual laughs, but instead, everyone was listening to a news broadcast.

  “What’s the big deal about the news—” Frankie started to say when Huckle grabbed her arm, and made her sit.

  “Shut up,” she said.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Don’t you know anything?
” Stella hissed. “They bombed our ships!”

  “What ships? Who did? Why?”

  “Shut up and listen!”

  “From the NBC newsroom in New York: President Roosevelt said in a statement today that the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by air! I’ll repeat, President Roosevelt said in a statement today that the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by air! Now we’ll go live to KTU in Hawaii.”

  They went to some other man who was talking on a bad telephone line, hissing with static. Even still, he sounded breathless and a little excited, and he never said his name like the announcers usually did. “The city of Honolulu has also been attacked and considerable damage done. This battle has been going on for nearly three hours. A bomb dropped within fifty feet of the KTU radio tower. This is no joke,” he said. “It is a real war.”

  Sister Bert turned the radio off.

  “It is a joke, though, right, Sister?” Frankie asked. “Like that program about the invaders from Mars?” It had been years before, but she still remembered it. There was a radio show about space aliens landing in New Jersey or New York or somewhere and killing everybody with heat rays. It was so real, with explosions and gunfire and a man who sounded just like the president. The sisters had them all kneeling and praying for hours before anybody figured out the world hadn’t really ended, and it was all for laughs. Frankie thought Sister George was going to storm the capital, she was so mad.

  Now Sister Bert said, “No. I don’t think it’s a joke.” Her normally pale face looked even paler, and she rubbed her cheeks with both hands. “It means we’re at war.”

  “War with Japan?” Huckle said.

  “Yes. Most likely many more boys will sign up for the service.”

  Frankie thought of Sam sprawled out at her feet in the kitchen; she thought of Vito in Colorado. Vito was only sixteen, but what if the war lasted a long time? Would he have to go? Would he be sent all the way to Japan? Would Sam? Would they all?

  I thought of my own brothers at the start of World War I, another war that had seemed as if it couldn’t touch us, could never affect us. “That’s Europe’s problem, not ours,” my father had said from behind his newspaper. “America comes first.”