Between Before and After

by Maureen Doyle McQuerry

  Head down, Elaine backed away, fast but not too fast. Not before Tom, his belly lunging over the dirty white apron tied around his waist, grabbed Elaine’s arm in a meaty hand.

  “What’re you playing at?” His face was so close, she could smell the garlic on his breath. Her arm crushed in his grip.

  “I don’t—”

  “Aaahh!” Tom dropped her arm and grabbed his shin. “Hooligans!”

  “Come on, Lainey!” Stephen was at her side, pulling at her skirt.

  They bolted. Dodging stacks of rye bread, carts of cabbages, and harried shoppers, they ran until Elaine’s eyes swelled and her side stitched. She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, and drew a few shuddering breaths, expecting a policeman’s whistle any second, but when she looked up no one was paying them any attention.

  Stephen pulled the single apple of out his pocket, took a bite, and handed it to his sister.

  “What did you do to him?” Her words puffed out with the last of her breath.

  “Kicked him in the shin. I didn’t want him to take you away!”

  “Not so loud!” They were in a narrow aisle between a cheese monger and barrels of kosher pickles, near the permanent brick stalls. Only one person eyed them. The pigeon man. Elaine felt her face flame. He was looking right at them, and Elaine could swear she saw a smile twitching at the corner of his lips. Then he rubbed his hand across his mouth and bent down to check the water in the nearest crate.

  When he stood back up, he was holding a fat pigeon with feathers shiny as an oil slick. The bird didn’t struggle. Its bright eyes blinked, then darted back and forth. With deft fingers, the pigeon man checked the band on the bird’s leg and adjusted the tube. Then he cooed to her a bit and set her on his shoulder.

  The apple gave a satisfying crunch when Elaine bit into it. Juice trickled onto her chin. The last apple she’d had was spongy because it was left in the barrel at the end of the day. She handed the next bite to Stephen.

  Elaine spied one of the mounted police a few rows away and dragged Stephen in the opposite direction. Threading their way between the lace makers and barrels of curry powders and cardamom pods, Elaine led Stephen deeper into Wallabout. This was her favorite section of the market. On Saturdays, she used to come here with her mother. They’d run their fingers over silks and sniff the teas. The market was one of the easiest places to get lost in the city and stay lost, if you didn’t want anyone to find you. And that was exactly what Elaine wanted now. The last six months had been the worst of her life.

  Chapter Six

  IN CASE ANYONE WAS WATCHING

  SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA—JUNE 1955

  Molly

  We moved to San Jose two years ago. Dad wanted a place in the country where a man could breathe. I wanted to stay at my school with my friends. Guess who lost?

  We drove fifty miles south on the Bayshore Highway, past mudflats, past the white hills of the Leslie saltworks, and past Moffett Field air base with its aircraft hangar big enough to produce its own weather, away from the only home I’d ever known. Angus was young enough to think it was fun. I knew better. Moving to San Jose felt like being exiled to a foreign country. No city, no street cars, no friends, only track houses and miles of orchards. I even missed the fog.

  I’d met Aricelia Lopez my first month here. Our houses had identical floor plans, but in reverse. We were the two new girls in seventh grade, the newest of the new. Now, sitting on the Lopez’s front lawn, I was about to test that bond, but she preempted me.

  “What’s up with your mom?” Ari stood on her little brother’s tire swing. As the swing slowly arced back and forth, webs of sun and shadow tangled across her face.

  Her question was casual, almost careless, but I could read the subtext.

  “She was upset.” I shrugged. I plucked two stout blades of grass from the lawn, and focused on slitting one open with my fingernail and slipping the other one through to avoid the question in her brown eyes.

  “I got that.”

  The sun glinted off the silver charm bracelet on her wrist as the tire swung a slow circle.

  What was there to say? Ari had seen the underbelly of my family, the soft, vulnerable place I took pains to hide from everyone. There were other kids who had parents that were divorced, but I didn’t know any whose mothers were crazy.

  When I looked up she was watching me, but without the pity I feared.

  “Your mom’s a writer. They can be temperamental.”

  I was grateful for the pass. She wasn’t going to press for more. And that made me feel even more guilty about having to drop a bomb.

  “I didn’t turn in the script.”

  “What? You know what that will do to our grade?”

  “I know, I’m really sorry.” I waited for an explosion. None came.

  “It wasn’t good enough to turn in.” I didn’t mention that after all the trouble in our yard, I’d just lost heart.

  “So you took a C? Because it wasn’t perfect?”

  For some reason it felt worse to produce a less-than-perfect product than to turn nothing in at all. My regret was that it meant taking Ari down with me.

  “I know. I’m an idiot. I should offer to do all your homework next year.”

  “Are you offering?”

  “No. But I’m willing to grovel.”

  She shook her head as if I was hopeless. “Who needs English?”

  It was an old joke. Her parents refused to let her speak Spanish at home unless she was talking to her abuela. They said it was important to “think and talk like an American.”

  “I don’t want to be a secretary, and I’m not going to teach. I’ll probably be an engineer like my dad or marry my cousin’s rich friend and live in Mexico City. Maybe both. I was getting a C anyway.”

  “You’re not mad? I would be.”

  She laughed and pushed off with one toe. Her dark hair whipped out behind her. “See what I mean about writers? They’re temperamental. You worry too much.”

  I’d been planning on an A. And my mother had been expecting me to get one. Writers got As in English. I was a writer’s daughter. I pictured the tight lines of disappointment in her face. It would be easier if she lectured. Instead, she’d turn away and retreat into herself. It might be days before I could coax her out.

  “Jesse’s got a job stocking at Woolworth’s this summer, some counter work too. Feel like a milkshake?” Ari asked.

  Jesse was Ari’s sixteen-year-old, well-muscled, dimple-ridden, laughing-eyed brother. I was his kid sister’s friend. Ari laughed as my cheeks grew hot.

  “Can’t. I have to beat the mailman home.”

  “Won’t your mom notice if your report card doesn’t come?”

  I stood up and brushed off my shorts.

  “She’s a writer,” I said.

  As I turned to go, Ari called after me, “Hide the pruning shears, just in case.”

  When I got home, Angus was already on the front porch. The third Monday of every month, the mailman lugged a big box to our door and rang the bell, asking the same corny question each time.

  “What you got there, a body or something?” Mr. Kaminski winked at me and then laughed a round belly kind of laugh. I always laughed back; partly to be polite, mostly because I liked to hear him snort.

  He was the same mailman who delivered the New York Times every Saturday. My mother’s one indulgence. He had a saying for that delivery too. “For my highfalutin family.”

  I rooted through the mailbox. A few bills, an ad for a new tire store, no report card. I let out my breath.

  Angus had already tugged the box through the door, wrestling it into the middle of the living room where Mom was working. All day she sorted, muttered, clucked her tongue, and clicked the typewriter keys, her copper hair pulled back in a careless ponytail. I looked at her now. There was a rip in the shoulder of her blue sweater and a streak of something black along the ridge of her perfect nose, a nose I aspired to one day.

  “I got here firs
t.” Angus said it matter-of-factly and wandered off toward his bedroom. It didn’t really matter. The game was old. We both knew what was inside. It was nothing but papers and a few pictures; papers about people who were no longer living, my mother’s box of alphabetical lives for the National Biography Project.

  Outside, the sky puckered as if it was about to rain again. Mom hardly looked up. It was a J month, meaning the box was full of the lives of dead people whose last name began with J. At first, I’d shared her enthusiasm for this library of the dead. I read scraps of papers, old letters, yellow newspaper clippings, but the people never sprang to life for me. They were only ink people on paper, but they demanded more of her attention than we did.

  I wandered off to Angus’s room. The clutter made me nervous if I stayed there too long, and there was this little boy smell I didn’t want to think too much about.

  My brother had “the knack,” or at least that’s what I called it. He was born with it—the ability to take anything apart and put it together again, sometimes in ways that were even better than the original. No one taught him. He didn’t inherit it. My mother couldn’t even operate a can opener without swearing, and my father once added oil to the radiator in his car.

  Angus was happiest when he was in his own room. It was his workshop, full of bits and pieces of things: springs and motors, miniature fans, and screwdrivers. He hummed, he chortled to himself as he worked, and in that way he’s like Mom. I’m the only one who needs human companionship.

  “Molly, pay attention. I want you to hold the throwing arm while I work on the catch.” Angus furrowed his red brows at me.

  “I’m listening to every word you say. It’s just I don’t care about making things.” I grasped the ruler he called a throwing arm and held it still while he used two hands to do something with a rubber band and paper clips.

  “You make things. You’re always writing in that journal of yours.”

  “That’s different.” I sat back on my heels. I knew even as I said it that Angus had a point.

  His tongue peeked between his lips. I could glimpse his crooked eyetooth that overlapped the tooth next to it. His magic tooth, as he called it, that gave him his special mechanical abilities.

  “There, I’ve got it!’ He scratched his nose with one end of a paper clip.

  It had been raining on and off for most of the week; it was the beginning of summer vacation, and if we were like other families we might have plans to go somewhere, like camping or to visit a grandmother. But we weren’t like other families. If I left Mom and Angus alone, they’d starve to death, dying in the same smelly clothes they’d been wearing for a week.

  It was usually up to me to make dinner and run the laundry so that we looked like a normal family. In case anyone was watching.

  Chapter Seven

  BOXES OF THE DEAD

  SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA—JUNE 1955

  Molly

  My mother worked on a brand-new 1955 Smith Corona. It was her pride and joy, paid for with some of the advance money from the National Biography publisher after her old typewriter lost first the s, and then stuck every time you pushed the i or p keys. The last sound I heard most nights when I fell asleep was the tapping of keys, and sometimes in the middle of the night they tap danced through my dreams.

  After giving up on Angus, I decided to offer Mom some help. I needed to be on her good side when the report card came. And more than that, I wanted to keep an eye on her.

  She was chewing a lock of her hair as she read over her notes, a glass of iced coffee at her elbow, an uneaten grilled cheese I’d made that morning cold and dry on a paper plate.

  “Who are you writing about?” I perched on the arm of the brown chenille sofa. Her gaze rose slowly like someone awaking from sleep.

  “Oh, Molly. You startled me. Richard Nigel Jerome. You won’t know anything about him. He was a clergyman who died a long time ago, nineteen twenty-three.” She took a swallow of coffee, poked the cheese with her finger, frowned, and looked at me. “I forgot your sandwich.”

  “That’s okay. I thought you might be hungry.”

  “Oh, Molly. I’m sorry.” She nibbled a mouse bite and made a face. We both laughed. I felt a knot loosen in my chest.

  “I thought maybe I could help you with the Js. You know, sort the papers or something.”

  “Well—” She looked at the half-emptied box, at the neat stacks of documents on the floor. I could tell she was afraid I might make more work for her, mess up her precious bits of paper. I swallowed the words that blistered on my tongue.

  “How do you get to be in a box?” I began to sort through the files about someone named Robert Johnson.

  “You have to do something remarkable, invent something, have a special talent. At least have a famous family.” She took another swallow of iced coffee. “And you have to be dead, of course.”

  I dipped into the box, grabbed a folder, and spread Robert Johnson’s life across the floor.

  It said “Blues Legend Dies” in bold print under a picture of him playing a guitar.

  “How dead? I mean, do you have to have been dead for a very long time?”

  “Just dead, maybe two years before there’s enough collected on the person to make a file.”

  “Then I guess Albert Einstein won’t be in a box yet.” He had just died a few months ago, but he was important enough to have an article about his theory of relativity in our science books at school.

  She gave me a funny look and said probably not, but everyone knew who he was anyhow, and he’d probably been in the New York Times obituaries. If I was going to help her work, I couldn’t ask so many distracting questions. And I thought, This is how it always is—we are the distractions from the people in the boxes.

  I’d never looked at the obituary section of a newspaper. I opened last Sunday’s New York Times and searched for the index. Obituaries were listed alongside marriages, lost and found, and missing persons. It seemed that there were many missing people in New York, which made me wonder what had happened to each of them. Someone was looking for a lady named MaryAnn Binder, who was a telephone operator and was last seen wearing a green coat. Another person was looking for his son, who disappeared New Year’s Eve. An insurance company wanted anyone who’d witnessed an accident on June 1 to call them.

  It was then, while I was still looking at the classifieds, that I had my grand idea.

  The idea came to him when he eavesdropped. The woodcutter’s house was small and full of secrets. Hansel was good at listening in. He never fell asleep as quickly as his sister, and their small sleeping alcove was separated from the main room by the thinnest of partitions. From his bed, he heard the rumors in the wind that clawed against their windows. He heard the voice of his stepmother, as persuasive as honey. He heard all kinds of things that Gretel missed. And what he heard this time made his heart beat faster, his palms grow cold. If they were careful, if he could fill his pockets with chips of stone, they would survive. He looked at his sleeping sister. His plan would see them through.

  Chapter Eight

  THE CIGAR BOX

  SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA—JUNE 1955

  Molly

  The investigation into my mother’s past needed a starting point. I had the clues from her dresser; now I’d write a classified ad. I wasn’t sure what it would say yet or how to go about getting it published, but the thought made me feel lighter. If hope was a bird, like my teacher and Emily Dickinson liked to say, I’d throw a net over it.

  It’s funny how one good idea seems to coax others out of the shadows. Not only would I write a classified ad, I’d begin a biography box for her like the ones she excavated for the National Biography Project.

  From the lineup of items on my bookcase I selected a favorite Uncle Stephen had given me a few years ago. It was a square wooden cigar box with a picture of a white owl perched on a cigar under the words White Owl Brand. The cigars had been a gift from a grateful parent and Uncle Stephen had smoked every one of t
hem. Every time I opened it, I could still inhale the sweet scent of tobacco.

  Small and ornate, the cigar box closed with a tiny brass lock. A perfect container for my mother’s biography.

  I got my journal and a pencil and began writing the ad, but it wasn’t as easy as I’d thought it would be. Mom wasn’t a missing person. But there were parts of her that were. What I really wanted was information about who she’d been. I read the ads over and over, picked out key words, and finally settled for:

  Seeking information about Elaine Fitzgerald Donnelly born in Brooklyn, NY October 26, 1904. Contact Molly Donnelly 3308 Kirk St. San Jose, CA.

  An address was safer than a phone number. I knew when the mail came, and I could be certain that I was the one who retrieved it.

  Beginning the biography box required an accomplice. I knew I had to return the envelope with the ring and newspaper headline to her dresser in case she ever went looking for it. But I thought it might be wise to document my sources.

  Angus was young and unreliable. I’d already decided enlisting Uncle Stephen would only complicate matters. I considered Ari. Not only was she my best friend, we were brain doubles. We shared each other’s thoughts. At least until recently. In the last year, boys had begun to take up significant brain space that used to belong to me. But she was still my go-to person when adventure called, and she’d already witnessed my mother’s dark side. She also had access to the very thing I needed, a Polaroid Land camera.

  In a matter of minutes, I was back at her front door. Her family was getting ready for their yearly summer trek to visit cousins in Mexico City. After explaining the basic concept of the biography box and enlisting Ari to help me with my research, I made my case for the Polaroid.

  “We can take pictures of the clues and put the pictures in the cigar box. We need to borrow the camera from your dad for the greater good.”

  Resting her hands on her hips, she said, “He’d kill me. Boil me in burning oil. Hang me by both thumbs. That camera is new. You know what he’s like.”