by Stacey Lee
Nudging Francesca, I nod toward the departing pair. She swallows her mouthful and puts down her stick fork. A look of mutual sympathy passes between us. Without saying a word, we rise and follow.
We pick our way over the clipped grass, our leaf plates held with both hands to prevent the noodles from sliding off. My spaghetti taunts me. Eat me! Don’t worry about those people. Someone else will provide.
But of course, I know that’s not true. Even God has not proven reliable as of late.
We finally catch up with them near their campsite, a clearing filled with a dozen tents and people milling about. “Excuse us!” I call out.
The mother and daughter turn around, regarding us with amazement.
“I am Mercy Wong, and this is Francesca Bellini. We had extra.” I hold out my plate to the woman. A young man about our age joins them.
The girl pulls at the lank strings of her hair, her round chin trembling. Her mother takes the food. “Bless you. We tried ter take taters from a chips station that ’ad fallen, but there were soldiers wif shooters,” she says in an Irish accent that sounds like she’s holding a plum in her mouth. “Said looters would be shot on the bloody Bobby Scott. Mayor Schmitz issued a written proclamation.” The woman’s mouth trembles. “I just wanna feed me children.”
Francesca gasps. “That’s dreadful.”
“Surely they should make exceptions,” I add, not completely following the woman’s speech but getting the gist. “The enemy is the fire, not its victims.”
The woman shakes her head. “They’ve declared martial law.”
Francesca holds her leaf out to the young man, who has the same floppy brown hair and rounded chin as his sister and mother. “Please, we don’t want it to go to waste.”
He reluctantly accepts the food, and though it’s dark, I can see the shame on his cheeks.
Is it harder to give up one’s dinner, or take it as charity? With hunger pangs as sharp as knives jabbing my stomach, I’d take a handout with gullet open wide. But for him—maybe because he is a boy and we are girls—the choice seems harder.
Francesca walks faster than normal back to our camp. “When will the army come? People are suffering.”
I glance around at all the people shuffling about. “I know. I wish there was something we could do.”
What would Ma do if she were here? She would make sure we ate by any means necessary. We might’ve been poor, but our bowls were never empty. If Ma had seen all the hungry people here, she wouldn’t have hung up her apron until she had given them something.
By the time we return to camp, Harry and Katie are washing off the twig forks. Georgina and Minnie Mae are folding leaves into cones to use for drinking water. That’s clever, as we only have one fruit jar to use between the eleven of us. The Bostons droop into one another like three sacks of flour. One reads from the comportment book to the others. With the first chapter already gone, there are now fifty-nine chapters to go. Our toilet supply will last another two months at this rate.
The vanishing sun lights the sky a strange yellow purple, half day in the west and half night in the east. It amazes me that even when the world is going to hell in a handcart, there’s still beauty in the fringes.
Francesca gives the cooling pot a stir. “Grandmother Luciana says pasta water is full of nutrients.” Making ourselves comfortable, we huddle close to the dying fires and take turns filling the empty spaces in our stomachs. Folks stop by, peering into our pots to see if we have anything good. We offer them pasta water, and all but one accept a sip from our much-used fruit jar.
Harry and Katie huddle beside us. “That was prime, what you did,” Katie says. “You girls are of the first water, Gran would say.”
“They needed it more than we did,” I say, though my grumbling stomach says otherwise.
Francesca hands me a spoonful of pasta water. “We can boil a gruel of rice to sit overnight for breakfast. It’s better with milk, but since we already drained the cow, we can use water.”
I brighten. “That’s how we make juk. We ate that for breakfast all the time. Lunch and dinner, too. Jack loved it; he’d gobble it faster than Ma could put it in his bowl. She called him her bottomless jar.” The memory makes my heart ache, and suddenly, I’m no longer hungry.
I pass the spoon to Francesca, but she merely holds onto it. All three girls’ eyes shift to me. I stiffen, putting the wall back up, willing them to look away.
“Mercy?” says Francesca. “I hope you don’t blame yourself for what happened. There’s nothing you could’ve done.”
Her soft words squeeze my heart. Even if she speaks the truth, it is a truth I can’t accept right now, and maybe for a long time.
When Tom’s mother died, he got into a fight with anyone who breathed wrong around him. He stayed mad for a good year, and even now, he doesn’t like to talk about it. It’s almost as if, by staying mad, he acknowledges that she mattered to him. I think it’ll be the same for me.
The stars wink, teasing me with the notion that this has all been some colossal joke. That I will wake up any second in the living room of our flat on Clay Street with the smell of pomelo in the air. But the universe never jokes. It is always profoundly, unflinchingly serious.
I clench my fists, feeling the pinch of my fingernails in my palms, squeezing harder until the discomfort makes me let go. The pain is real, both inside and out. My life has changed. There is no going back. There is only holding on to this present, whose shape is as hard to define as a cloud.
My mind flips to the last chapter of The Book for Business-Minded Women, where Mrs. Lowry discusses when bad things happen to good businesses. Our success is determined not by external forces, but how we react to them. And didn’t Ma always tell her more hapless clients that you can’t prevent the birds of misfortune from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from making nests in your hair?
If I want to survive—not just the earthquake—I must march, swim, pull oars, and dig in. I mustn’t stay still.
Katie bumps my knee with her own. “What are you thinking, Mercy?”
“About hunger. This park is full of hungry people. Maybe they can stand it the first night. But what about tomorrow? The next day? Next week?”
“Will we be here that long?” asks Harry. It’s the first she’s spoken since the leeching.
“I hope not. But it’s always good to be prepared.”
Francesca’s dark eyes look luminous against her pale skin. “What are you suggesting?”
“Tonight, we fed a dozen, but tomorrow, I bet we can feed twice, no, three times that, or . . .” My mind whirls with numbers, and lands on four, my numeral nemesis. If I can feed forty-four people, I can turn that inauspicious number into something good for both me and my ma.
Forty-four people from different cultures would make one big neighborhood—the way Jack thought we should live, at least for a night. I will honor both of their memories, maybe even bettering their stations in the afterlife. “Tomorrow, we make a feast for forty-four.”
Katie’s nose crinkles. “Why forty-four?”
“It slides off the tongue: feast for forty-four.” If they knew of our superstitions, they might think us narrow-minded, when in fact Ma was the wisest person I knew. I poke another log into the fire and watch the flame spread.
“But how?” asks Francesca. “You heard the woman. She said they’re shooting looters on the spot.”
Harry’s hand flies to her mouth, and Katie crosses her arms over her narrow chest. “Shooting them? Living people are a dying breed.”
“That’s why we need to help. Who’s going to feed them if we don’t? Plus, dying by gunshot is an easier way to go than slow starvation.”
“Gran always said, ‘Who needs a clear conscience to be happy when a full stomach does the job even quicker.’”
Francesca sets another pot of wate
r on the flame. “Food is comfort. Best feeling in the world is when a patron comes in looking glum and leaves with a smile.” She pours half the bag of rice into the pot, adds a dash of salt, then stirs. “That’s why I wanted my parents to leave the restaurant to me, not my brother.” She tosses me a grin. “Mercy blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”
“Is that from the Bible?”
“No.” Her grin widens. “Shakespeare. If you think we can do it, Mercy, I’m in with both feet.” She wipes her hand on the front of her dress, then holds it out. I place mine on top.
Katie adds her hand. “Pile on the pancakes. Come on, Harry, pour on the syrup.”
Harry seems to startle at hearing her name. She pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose and stares at our hands. Then, with the solemnity of a judge being sworn to office, she tops off the pile.
Another explosion booms from far away, and a siren begins to wail. But we don’t let our hands fall.
28
INSIDE THE TENT, HARRY AND FRANCESCA lie between Katie and me, the warmest bodies of the bunch. The cold never bothered me much. Ah-Suk says it’s because I have good energy, which I got from Ma.
Francesca rolls onto her stomach. “Should we invite the other girls to join us in making tomorrow’s dinner?”
“They may not want to because of the looting order,” Harry says quietly.
I tap my chin. “So we give them a choice. Leave it to me.”
“We’ll find some other groceries. But not like Gil’s.” Francesca looks at me darkly.
“We can’t bring the crates,” I say. “Too obvious.” Grass pokes my cheek through the canvas floor. “Remember the deli on Hayes where we got the sassafras? It looked intact, except for the windows.”
Francesca nods. “Maybe they’ll have some crusty old bread, and I’ll make chicken parmigiana with the bread crumbs.” She’s so close I can feel the warmth of her breath. “Of course, we’d need to get a chicken for that, and a good knife. One chicken normally feeds about four people, but with pasta and small portions, we can stretch it.”
Jack loved chicken, especially chicken soup with lots of ginger and red dates.
I try to focus on her chatter to keep my mind off him, but it’s impossible, like holding up a crate of bricks for too long. The memories come falling down. The careful way he folded his only shirt. The time he walked seven blocks with a cone of sugared ice that had melted down his arm by the time he finally found me to share it with. If only I hadn’t been in such a rush to go off to school, I would have been there when the earthquake hit. I could have saved them.
Or died trying.
Dawn breaks like a duck egg, spilling a golden light into the fog. Ash litters the grass, a bleak reminder that though we may not see the destruction from our park haven, it is real just the same.
Did Ba sleep last night? I wonder again if he is safe. I wonder if he thinks I’m dead. The burned tang of smoke still hangs in the air, and the sirens have started up again, or maybe they never stopped. Maybe those sounds and smells have become part of the landscape here, as permanent as the fog and the hills.
I crawl out of our tent and am surprised to see Elodie sitting cross-legged on the wet lawn, drinking the last of the water from our fruit jar. A journal lies open on her lap, pencil in the seam.
I nod to her and rub the sleeves of my Chinese jacket. At least she could’ve thought to start the fire. “Good morning.”
“If you say so.” Plum-colored circles underscore her eyes.
“I heard about your mother. I’m sorry for your loss. If there’s anything I can do—”
She ticks her head to the side, and her greasy hair, no longer in its elaborate hairdo, shifts in clumps. Boy does she need a bath. “You can’t do anything except stop yapping,” she says sharply. “You’re like my mother’s old terrier, yap and yap and never give up.”
My temper flares, and my mind floods with all the insults I could hurl. That she should do something useful, drag her sorry butt up and refill the water pot or strike a damn match. That if I had a nickel for every time she rubbed me wrong, I could start a mint. That at least my mother wasn’t carrying on with a priest!
But Mrs. Lowry’s word unsinkable flashes through my mind as bright as a marquee, and I let the moment pass. We may not like each other, but now we are sisters in mourning.
“Why don’t you go back home? Wait for your father there?”
She laughs, but not in a funny way. “Didn’t you hear? Nob Hill is a pile of rocks. I don’t have a home.” Her defiant eyes linger on me for a moment, then she tosses back the last of the water and picks up her pencil.
So it’s true. Even Nob Hill has fallen. Mr. Mortimer was fond of saying that all cards return to the deck at some point—kings, queens, and even twos. He was talking about death, but it strikes me that catastrophes have the power to equalize us, just as well.
I revive the fire and set our cold pot of rice porridge on top. The mush has acquired a top layer of dust and a few bugs, which I skim off. Francesca emerges from the tent and stretches her fists to the sky. Unlike Elodie, she looks impossibly fresh, with a rosiness to her cheeks and a brightness to her eyes. She seems more at home here than the wainscoted halls of St. Clare’s.
“Good morning,” she says. Her eyes fall to Elodie. “Oh, hello.”
Elodie barely glances up. What could she be writing in there? I try to get a glimpse, but as if sensing my intent, she pulls the journal closer to her.
I lift the empty pot and wrap my arms around it. “I’m going to fetch water before the line starts up.”
“I’ll come,” says Francesca.
The cow is still tethered to the gnarled cypress tree, thank goodness, and looks like it will need some relief soon. Something around the cow’s neck catches my eye. It’s a bit of yellow ribbon tied in a loose collar. “Look!” I whisper.
We approach the animal, which is pulling out a weed, tail flicking at flies. On the ribbon, someone has written words in dark pencil lead. It’s Minnie Mae’s hair bow.
“It says, ‘Forgive us,’” Francesca breathes.
“She found a way to write her letter.”
We work our way to the pump, which lies closer to the Children’s Quarters. The fog is beginning to lift, revealing the continued growth in population, and not all of them with proper tents, either. There are tents made of blankets, of clothes, of crazy quilts hung over tree branches. Some folks have no cover at all and are simply huddled together for warmth. A man in a swallowtail coat approaches a woman wrapped in a blanket. He holds up a birdcage full of kittens. “Their mama ran off. If you could just take one of the babes, it would help a lot.”
The woman gets to her feet, and her blanket falls away, exposing a stomach you could balance a tray on. She rubs her belly. “Sorry. Got my own babe to worry about.”
I grab the pump handle and pull. “What’s taking that army so long? Did they get lost?”
Francesca’s brow ruffles. “Maybe they’re fighting fires. The firefighters must be overwhelmed since they’re having such a hard time getting water.”
I grimly dispense another pump, wondering if our use here is somehow costing a life. But if we don’t drink it, someone else will, and we can’t very well survive without it.
We slowly carry our pot back to the camp, trying not to spill a drop.
“Did you feel all those tremblers last night?” Francesca asks.
“I was hoping it was you twitching.”
More people are waking. We pass a couple of young men, who watch us port our load with interest. Or rather, they watch Francesca. Her uniform hangs primly, and she’s swept up her hair into a knot.
“Won’t your young man be looking for you? Marcus, was it?”
“Knowing him, he’s joined the volunteer army already. He likes to order people around.” Water sloshes over the
lip of her side of the pot.
“You don’t like him.”
“I like him in the way that a seagull likes a rocky cliff, I suppose,” she says bleakly. “He makes a good place to roost, way up high, which of course is the reason my parents wished me to go to St. Clare’s. Not everyone wants a dago in their family—we’re too loud, drunk, or garlicky for proper society. We were lucky Headmistress Crouch convinced the board to let me in.”
No wonder she has a soft spot for the woman. “The French are pretty garlicky, too,” I mutter. The pot is slipping, and I adjust my grip. “Well, the thing about seagulls is that they were born with wings. Means they can reach those rocky cliffs all by themselves, if they want, and maybe go even higher.”
Francesca shares half a smile. “I suppose.”
I consider telling her about Tom, but it’s too complicated. I wonder what he is doing now. Once he hears about the earthquake, of course he’ll come back, won’t he? He wouldn’t let a little fight with Ah-Suk stop him. Though it still might take him weeks. He’d have to find transportation. Maybe he’ll swoop in on a flyer, like some rare bird. But how will he find us?
All the girls are milling about the campfires by the time we return. To my surprise, each of the Bostons have their hands snowballed around a tiny kitten. The man in the swallowtail coat found some patsies. I sigh. More mouths to feed, assuming they last the night. At least we have the cow.
I don’t see Headmistress Crouch among the girls, and she is usually the first up. I consider waking her but decide against it. Let the woman sleep as long as she can.
In the distance, Katie is showing Minnie Mae how to milk the cow. Harry has taken the porridge off the stove and is stirring it cool. Folks on their way to the water pump gaze hungrily at our pot. The looks don’t go unnoticed by the girls, who stare awkwardly at one another. The time has come to speak.
When Katie and Minnie Mae return with the milk, I step up onto a crate. “Good morning, ladies.” The girls stop what they’re doing and look up at me, all except Elodie, who continues scribbling in her journal. “We have all had a shaky twenty-four hours, but we have survived, and, God willing, we will emerge from this park stronger for having gone through it.”