Praise for
BETWEEN BEFORE & AFTER
“A beautifully layered story of secrets, hope, and change. This gem of a novel has all the hallmarks of a classic.”
MEGAN CHANCE, bestselling, critically acclaimed, award-winning author of the Fianna Trilogy
“Maureen’s flowing prose pulls the reader in closely to the harsh realities of life for children in 1918 New York City, but also conveys the strength of a sister’s love for her brother when everything dear to them is ripped away. The duel narratives of Molly and Elaine grip the reader in a crescendo of suspense that pays off like a favorite fairy tale.”
MARY CRONK FARRELL, award-winning author of Pure Grit and the upcoming Standing Up Against Hate
“This coming-of-age novel about a mother and daughter delves into the complex nature of relationships with an earnest voice and vivid details. Highly recommended!”
STEPHANIE MORRILL, author of The Lost Girl of Astor Street and Within These Lines
“In Between Before and After, Maureen McQuerry weaves two equally captivating storylines into a seamless and moving tale of a daughter’s search for her mother’s truth. There’s no better way to say it than this—I loved this book!”
SUZANNE SELFORS, bestselling author of the Imaginary Veterinary series and the Wedgie & Gizmo series
“Between Before and After is that rare novel where you want to turn the pages quickly but must resist because you want to savor every word. McQuerry’s richly rendered settings of New York City in 1918 during the flu pandemic and San Jose, California, in 1955 feature conflicted characters in challenging real-life situations. An unforgettable read, start to finish.”
STEPHEN WALLENFELS, author of Bad Call (Disney/Hyperion) and Deadfall
Between Before and After
Copyright © 2019 by Maureen McQuerry
Requests for information should be addressed to:
Blink, 3900 Sparks Dr. SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McQuerry, Maureen, 1955- author.
Title: Between before and after / Maureen Doyle McQuerry.
Description: Grand Rapids, Michigan : Blink, [2019] | Summary: In a dual narrative, Elaine struggles to protect herself and brother Stephen in 1918 New York City, and Molly, her daughter, does the same for her brother, Angus, in 1955 San Jose, California.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018047870 (print) | LCCN 2018052918 (ebook) | ISBN 9780310767299 (ebook) | ISBN 9780310767381 (hardback) | ISBN 9780310767282 (softcover)
Subjects: | CYAC: Secrets—Fiction. | Brothers and sisters—Fiction. | Single-parent families—Fiction. | Family problems—Fiction. | San Jose (Calif.)—History—20th century—Fiction. | New York (N.Y.)—History—20th century—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.M24715 (ebook) | LCC PZ7.M24715 Bg 2019 (print) | DDC
[Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018047870
Epub Edition December 2018 9780310767299
All Internet addresses (websites, blogs, etc.) and telephone numbers in this book are offered as a resource. They are not intended in any way to be or imply an endorsement by the publisher, nor does the publisher vouch for the content of these sites and numbers for the life of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Cover design: Brand Navigation
Interior design: Denise Froehlich
Printed in the United States of America
18 19 20 21 22 23 / LSC / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my surprise brothers Richard and Roger.
We followed the breadcrumbs home.
And for Bill, who was lost in the woods.
CONTENTS
Praise for Between Before & After
Prologue
Chapter One: Pruning
Chapter Two: Hansel and Gretel
Chapter Three: The New Year
Chapter Four: After
Chapter Five: Wallabout Market
Chapter Six: In Case Anyone Was Watching
Chapter Seven: Boxes of the Dead
Chapter Eight: The Cigar Box
Chapter Nine: Pigeons
Chapter Ten: May Gossley
Chapter Eleven: Mcdonald’s
Chapter Twelve: Investigation
Chapter Thirteen: Hot Dogs
Chapter Fourteen: The Miracle Boy
Chapter Fifteen: Woodward School
Chapter Sixteen: Raymond Street
Chapter Seventeen: A Real Job
Chapter Eighteen: The “T”
Chapter Nineteen: Proof
Chapter Twenty: A Library Job
Chapter Twenty-One: Dope
Chapter Twenty-Two: Crossing the Line
Chapter Twenty-Three: Hansel and Gretel
Chapter Twenty-Four: Hope
Chapter Twenty-Five: Vulnerable
Chapter Twenty-Six: Girls Who Are Different
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Back to the Market
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Drake Brothers Bakery
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Priests and Pigeons
Chapter Thirty: Pigeon Post
Chapter Thirty-One: The Picnic
Chapter Thirty-Two: In the Brambles
Chapter Thirty-Three: The Miracle Boy
Chapter Thirty-Four: The River
Chapter Thirty-Five: Set Apart
Chapter Thirty-Six: Orphan
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Wings
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Change of Plans
Chapter Thirty-Nine: The Gingerbread House
Chapter Forty: Against the Wind
Chapter Forty-One: Graduation
Chapter Forty-Two: Into the Fire
Chapter Forty-Three: Flight
Chapter Forty-Four: Thoughts Like Quicksand
Chapter Forty-Five: Woodward House
Chapter Forty-Six: The Man in the Car
Chapter Forty-Seven: Arthur
Chapter Forty-Eight: Lifeline
Chapter Forty-Nine: The Way Home
Chapter Fifty: Family
Chapter Fifty-One: Revelations
Chapter Fifty-Two: Burying the Past
Chapter Fifty-Three: New York
Chapter Fifty-Four: Room for Miracles
Chapter Fifty-Five: Finding Their Way
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
PROLOGUE
The year Uncle Stephen performed a miracle, all our lives changed. Of course, at first no one was sure it was a miracle; miracles aren’t things you see every day, so how could you know? Even after the investigation, our lives kept changing. When a miracle invades, Uncle Stephen says, it sends out roots that reach backward and forward in time. It catches people by surprise when they discover that everything they’ve seen of nature so far is only one part of a system. They forget about the other part, the part running underground.
We were a family of believers. Oh, not in miracles, or God, or anything conventional—except for Uncle Stephen, who was on a first-name basis with God and taught at a Catholic boys’ school. What we believed in was the power of stories—Angus, my mother, and me. My mother because they got her through, and Angus and me because we lis
tened right from the start.
The best stories can be as unpredictable as miracles. They can surprise you, even when you think you know them by heart. So don’t expect me to tell you everything right up front; you might not believe it. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that sometimes our minds prevent us from seeing the truth, even when it looks us square in the face.
Chapter One
PRUNING
SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA—JUNE 1955
Molly
I found the envelope stuck at the bottom of my mother’s lingerie drawer under some unmentionables. I was searching for a push-up bra to see if it could enhance my minor attributes when I made the discovery. The flap of the envelope was loose, no longer sealed by the yellowed piece of tape. Mom had taken my brother, Angus, to the dentist, and I was alone. I didn’t hesitate to open it. The fragrance was faint but unmistakable. White Shoulders.
A few black-and-white snapshots of my mother with my father tumbled out. In one, they were seated at a white tablecloth restaurant, holding champagne glasses. Mom was wearing elbow-length gloves and a hat with a full rose. Her dress veed off her shoulders and nipped in tightly at the waist. The second showed them at a Chinese restaurant making funny faces. It must have been New Year’s Eve because they were wearing shiny paper hats and party blowers littered the table. In the last one, they danced cheek to cheek. Mom wore a gardenia like a star in the red of her hair, her long neck the Milky Way. It made my throat tight to see them that way.
When I tried to stuff the photos back into the envelope, they stuck halfway in. Something more was inside. With one finger, I dragged out a tiny ring that just fit over my pinky. It was stiff and pale yellow. I ran my finger over it and held it up to the light. The ring was made of braided hair fine as corn silk! No one in our family had blond hair. I let it rest in the palm of my hand.
With the hair ring came a tiny clipping from a newspaper, nothing more than a headline: Woodward Closes Its Doors.
But let me back up and tell the story in order like Uncle Stephen says a beginning writer should. The trouble is knowing where to start. He says start close to the action. But life is made up of so many actions, big and small, that selecting the one that changes everything confuses me. You never know which will matter most in the end. I’ll begin with this, a morning last month.
The morning of my decision.
The morning of the butchering.
The phone rang early. Angus was still in his pajamas watching Howdy Doody. I’d recently dragged myself out of bed after staying up late to work on the script my best friend Ari and I were writing for an end-of-the-year project. Mom, who was just settling down to work with a cup of coffee, answered it.
Dragging the phone into the laundry room, she closed the door on the cord, which always meant one thing: an adult situation we weren’t supposed to know about. Recently, all adult situations involved my dad, who had been ordered out of the house right after Christmas when he said one too many times, “Bury your past before it buries you.”
When Mom stalked out of the laundry room, white-lipped and silent, I made a point of staying out of her trajectory. I poured myself a glass of orange juice and watched as she streaked across the backyard and disappeared into the garden shed.
“What’s Mom doing with the clippers?” Angus asked around a mouth of Trix as he watched from the sliding glass door.
“Pruning?” I said.
That had been Dad’s job. He was the gardener; she was not. Now that he was gone, that job, like so many others, would probably fall to me.
I joined Angus at the window, juice in hand. Mom was striding across the yard, the long-bladed shears clenched in both hands. There was something about the way her hands gripped the black-handled blades that made me uneasy, like wind ruffling the surface of water.
“I don’t feel so good.” Angus moved closer.
The carnage began with the roses. She hacked at their ruffled blooms until they dropped into monstrous drifts of red on the parched yellow lawn.
Milk sloshed from Angus’s bowl and trickled onto my foot. “She’s chopping off their heads.”
“Decapitation.” It wasn’t a word I had ever associated with flowers. I checked the clock. Ari would be here any minute. I couldn’t let her see us like this.
Next, she attacked the geraniums, the ones in pots by the door, and then the pink-striped blooms that massed by the cement porch. Foreheads pressed against the cool glass, our breath made circles of fog on the window as we watched. Like a demented barber, she sheared the long hairlike fronds of the weeping cherry, leaving the tree twisted and bald. By this time, the yard was a red-and-pink wound, and Angus was pressed tight to my side. It was impossible to look away. A few hot tears dripped from my chin, but I scrubbed them away with the heel of my hand.
The doorbell rang. With all my might, I willed Mom to stop.
“Molly?” Angus’s voice wavered.
“It’s Ari. Don’t say anything about Mom.”
I opened the front door just as Mom, small petals caught in her hair like snowflakes, ricocheted through the kitchen and into the living room. The saliva dried in my mouth. Ari stared. Mom kept going. I held my breath until her bedroom door slammed shut.
“Okay, then,” was all Ari said. She followed me into the kitchen, and I handed her the script we’d been working on.
“I made a few changes.”
For Angus, toast and peanut butter solved most things. While I toasted the bread, Ari, dark eyes squinted in concentration, thumbed through the pages in silence.
I cut rounds of banana to make a smiling face on the toast and handed it to Angus. Even when I was done, I avoided glancing toward the window, hoping Ari wouldn’t notice the damage.
“What happened to your yard?” She ran her tongue over her braces as she stared out the sliding glass door.
“Mom was pruning,” Angus said. “At least she didn’t pull up our vegetables.”
Ari raised newly plucked eyebrows at me. I thought I knew her every expression. Aricelia Guetteriez Lopez and I had survived junior high together and, in a few weeks, we’d finish freshman year. She was everything I was not: caramel skinned, curvy, and quick to laugh. And if that wasn’t enough, she had pierced ears. On her twelfth birthday, her abuela had given her tiny diamond studs to replace her gold hoops. This added instant glamor. She was striking, a word I quite liked but could never aspire to. The only thing in my favor was that I didn’t have braces, while Ari did. I was the first one she told after Jimmy Schmidt stuck his tongue in her mouth in the backseat of her brother’s car. She was there when my dad left. We shared secrets at sleepovers. But this time, what I saw in her eyes made me flinch.
I was someone to pity, set apart, as strange and vulnerable as an urchin without its shell.
I looked away, but she knew I’d seen it.
“I have to go. Mom’s taking me shopping. Thanks for working on the script.” Ari edged toward the door. “See you at school?”
“Sure,” I said, knowing my disappointment flavored the word and hating that she probably heard it.
In the empty kitchen, my dad’s ultimatum replayed in my thoughts like a scratched record. Bury your past before it buries you. I knew it was a metaphor. He was asking her to make peace with whatever haunted her and put it away for good. There was something in Mom’s past that drove Dad away, something that was a threat to her and by extension, to all of us.
Chapter Two
HANSEL AND GRETEL
SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA—JUNE 1955
Molly
Now I looked at the potential clues to my mother’s past. The news clipping was brittle and yellowed around the edges. The ring was light as a whisper in my hand. But what that whisper said wasn’t clear. I refolded the paper, then slipped both back into the envelope. It was time to call Uncle Stephen and discover what he knew.
I counted to ten, picturing each ring ricocheting off the walls of his studio apartment. Then I hung up. Maybe it was
for the best. How objective could he be where his only sister was concerned? His loyalties would lie with her. Maybe it was better to leave him out of the equation. Her past would be mine to investigate and then bury, if burying was what it would take to hold our family together.
As far as I could tell, only two things kept my mother grounded to us: my uncle Stephen and stories. Most nights she still told Angus a bedtime story. He was only nine, the second-child surprise when she believed she’d spawned an only. My stories had been over a long time ago, but sometimes I still liked to listen. She’d sit at the foot of Angus’s bed after tucking him in, hands folded in her lap. She was a different person then, more approachable, less like a skittish feral cat.
When I didn’t feel like being alone or wasn’t writing in my journal, I’d join them on my little brother’s bed.
Her two favorite stories were “Hansel and Gretel” and the one she called “The Four Horsemen.” Hansel and Gretel was the only book saved from her childhood. The cover was blue and most of the gold lettering had been worn off. Inside were strange and intricate pictures by Arthur Rackham. I kept it in the bookcase Uncle Stephen made, next to my writer’s journal. “The Four Horsemen” had no book to hold it. It was my mother’s story, and she knew it by heart.
“My father called my mother and her sisters the four horsemen. They were stair-step sisters, who boarded a boat in Ireland and sailed to New York. The oldest girl was twenty—”
“Tell us about your mother dying,” Angus said. The dying part was always a favorite and he preferred to cut right to the action. His cold feet pressed against my thigh and I squirmed away.
“When the plague came, the Great Flu of 1918, coffins were stacked chest high in the streets. When they ran out of coffins, there were piles of bodies. I wasn’t allowed out without a mask on my face. My mother, your grandmother, was the youngest sister. She was beautiful and good. Not like me.”
“You’re beautiful!” Angus was always ready to come to Mom’s defense.
But I was more intrigued by why she claimed she wasn’t good. I’d developed unconfirmed theories involving sneaking cigarettes and cutting school.
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