by Sheela Chari
“I’d turn the diamonds in,” Ma said. “That’s the legal thing to do.”
Uncle Richard said, “I’m not asking you. I’m asking Petey.”
I thought for a moment. “I’d hide them.”
Uncle Richard smiled. “You’re darn right. And if you were Rose, you’d hide yourself, too.”
“She went into hiding?” I asked, excited in spite of myself. It was like a spy movie.
“No, she died, Petey,” Ma said.
Uncle Richard shook his head. “The right way to say it is she disappeared, Petey. The authorities found her car gone off the Taconic Parkway, on fire and completely destroyed. Was this the work of the Fencers? Or Rose herself? Nobody knows. They didn’t find a body. But at least your family was left alone after that.”
“But for how long?” Ma asked pointedly.
“These Fencers,” I asked, “are they still around?” It was on the tip of my tongue to ask if Tops was one, but I was afraid. I didn’t want Uncle Richard or Ma to guess I had the black book.
Uncle Richard scowled. “Yeah, and they have kids. There’s a whole next generation of them. Younger and meaner. They don’t know a thing about running the business. They just want to get their hands on the missing loot.”
“This is going nowhere,” Ma interrupted. “Petey, I can see Uncle Richard is confusing you. He doesn’t know a beginning from an end. He just goes spinning in circles.”
“Life is just one middle after another, Shanthi. You ought to know that.”
They went back and forth, and while they did, a picture emerged. Grandma Rose had cut a set of diamonds she couldn’t sell. She couldn’t turn them over to the police either, because it was more money than she’d ever seen her whole life. And the police would want to know how she got them in the first place. So she disappeared. And now the Fencers were looking for the loot. But what loot? That’s when I realized something big.
“Wait, nobody caught Grandma Rose?” I asked. “What did she do with the diamonds?”
“That,” Uncle Richard said, “is the million-dollar question.”
I was floored. “No one knows where the diamonds are? And there aren’t any clues?”
Richard slurped from his cup. “Oh, there’s clues. Rose was a jeweler, wasn’t she? The night before she was gone, she left behind a necklace for me, and another for Omar. No explanation, no paper trail, just those two necklaces she said point to where the diamonds are, marked by an Om.”
“Necklaces?” I stammered. “Like, they have a message on them about where the diamonds are?”
“Like, I don’t know what they’re telling us,” Uncle Richard exclaimed. “I’ve looked them over and over, and they don’t tell a blazing thing.”
“Okay, that’s enough,” Ma said.
“So, wait, you have both of them?” I asked carefully.
“Mine’s gone, through no fault of my own,” Uncle Richard said, “and your mama says she gave away Omar’s to the Salvation Army. What made her do a fool thing like that, I don’t know.”
Ma bristled but she didn’t say anything.
Meanwhile, I tried to make sense out of what Uncle Richard said. “But I don’t get it. Why couldn’t she just tell you where the diamonds were? Why did she give you those necklaces instead?”
“Because that’s the way Rose was, Petey,” Ma said. “It was all a game for her.”
“No,” Uncle Richard said. “She was worried about us getting in trouble. This was her way of safeguarding us, of making sure we really wanted those diamonds before we went looking for them.”
“Or maybe she didn’t want anyone to find them,” Ma said. “How about that?”
“Well, that’s just crazy,” Uncle Richard said.
“I rest my case.” Ma turned to me. “Now, Petey, I’d like you to go upstairs. Richard and I have some talking to do. In private.”
What did they need to talk about in private? It had to be about Randall or me. Or the loot. I felt another tremor inside me. “But the diamonds, Ma,” I pleaded.
“Put that out of your mind. Those diamonds have brought nothing but misery to our lives. Who’s to say they exist at all, except in our fantasies.”
I stared at Ma. It seemed that if there was anything the universe could give us when we had nothing, it was this fortune left by my grandmother. Did Randall know? Was that why he was gone?
Upstairs, I went into a feverish pitch. Diamonds. Where would my grandmother hide them? And did my pop find them before he died? I went to the closet and pulled out the duffel bag. My pop’s last things. If he’d found the diamonds, the evidence was here in the bag. Randall must have known that. And yet he’d left the bag behind.
I emptied everything onto my bed. I looked through all of it once, twice. The harness, the ropes, the chalk, the metal clasps. The more I looked, the more frustrated I became. There was nothing here, nothing to suggest my pop had found the diamonds. As far as I could see, there were only two items of importance: the black book and the necklace. The black book held the warning about Tops. And what did the necklace say? Shouse.
Unexpectedly, I remembered Myla. She thought the Fencers were after her, and I laughed in her face. But maybe she wasn’t so far off. She’d been getting a few things right already. It had been a gamble telling her about my necklace, but I was so hungry for more information on Randall and Pop. And now the stakes had gone up tenfold. Could I crack the necklace when my uncle couldn’t? Could I trust Myla to help me?
I was watching TV in the family room when Cheetah came in with the newspaper and his tablet. “What do you want to hear first, Myla—the moon thing or the sad thing?”
I looked up from my show. “Neither.” Then I saw his face fall. “Okay, the moon thing.”
Cheetah held up the weather page from the Westchester Times. “Remember the Oms in the train stations? And what the policeman said about the next moonless night? That got me thinking. I checked news reports online, and it turns out all the Oms painted at the stations have happened on a new moon.”
“So?”
“So I looked at the moon forecast in the paper. Saturday is a new moon. Which is when Dobbs will get tagged, because it’s the next station on the line that doesn’t have an Om yet.”
In spite of myself, I felt a glimmer of interest. Was Cheetah right? Was Peter going to paint on Saturday night? “Hey, that’s pretty smart,” I said.
Cheetah flushed with pleasure. “Do you think I should tell Mom? You know how she hates graffiti. Maybe she can do something to stop it and—”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. I was still feeling out of sorts about Peter, but I didn’t want him to get in trouble. “She wouldn’t understand.”
“Understand what?”
I sighed. “That graffiti is art, Cheet. We can’t stop art from happening.”
He nodded. “I guess.”
“So what’s the sad thing? You said there were two things.”
“Oh, yeah.” Cheetah handed me the tablet. “It’s about how Peter’s dad died.”
When he said that, my stomach dropped. On his tablet was an obituary, dated seven years ago. I read the article and swallowed. “Are you sure it’s his dad?”
“There was only one Shanthi Wilson when I Googled.”
I was stunned. Then a vague feeling overcame me, a kind of déjà vu. “I know about this,” I said quietly. “It’s him, Cheetah.”
“Who?”
I shook my head. He wouldn’t have remembered the dinner party at Margaret’s all those years ago. He was too little. But I did. Hair like black licorice. It was all coming back. I couldn’t believe Peter was the same boy. I couldn’t believe it was the story of his dad that I’d heard so many years ago.
“Are you okay?” Cheetah asked me anxiously. “I thought you’d want to know.”
I looked at him and saw he was freaked out, too. “Don’t worry, Cheet. Forget about it. Do your spelling club stuff or something.”
“All right,” he said, uns
ure.
After my show was done, I went up to my room. My new bed hadn’t been delivered yet, so I stretched out on my old mattress. I missed my plywood bed. If you sat the right way on it, you could watch the sun setting behind the Palisades. From here, I couldn’t see a thing, just the room getting dark as it became evening.
Below I could hear the creak of Cheetah’s feet across the family room floor, and Beatles music wafting from my dad’s study where he was doing lesson plans. My thoughts crept to Peter. Why did he act the way he did about the black book? Why did he show me his necklace but not tell me about the Oms he painted? I thought of his sweatshirt with the specks of orange paint on his sleeves, of what he sprayed in the most improbable places, big splashes of color that were strangely brave and beautiful. I thought of his father falling from that building, and how I’d carried that memory of what happened all these years. Like a permanent tag. Like a stillness inside me.
For years, my dad tried to teach me yoga. We would start with the mountain pose, then tree pose, and finally triangle. But I couldn’t keep the lines of my body straight. I was always losing my balance, and to be honest, even standing still was hard—not for my body, but for my mind.
Dad says yoga isn’t about holding a pose, but making it last as long as you can. It’s a way to bring your body to rest, and your thoughts, too. But I didn’t want to rest my mind. I didn’t want to rest anything. The most important thing in the world was to move, and to keep moving.
*
In the kitchen, Mom emptied a bag of vegetarian Chinese takeout onto the counter.
“Again?” I asked. I’d come down when I heard her car in the garage and surveyed the items: tofu with peanut sauce, vegetarian wonton soup, and noodles with mixed vegetables.
“Oh, Myla, I barely had any time today,” Mom said.
“Well, it’s my favorite,” Cheetah said. “Let’s chow.”
“I know, Cheet,” Mom said, relieved. “At least one of you is happy.”
We assembled around the dining table after Mom and Dad set out the food. I pushed around the congealed tofu on my plate with my fork. How could Cheetah like this stuff? I was tired of takeout. It seemed like that’s all we were doing, that Mom was too tired to cook, or Dad would try to make something disgusting with Brussels sprouts, and we would still end up with takeout.
“Hey, I was thinking for the fall colors,” Mom said, “we could try Breakneck Ridge again.”
“No,” I said. I stabbed a broccoli with my fork.
“Why not?” Mom asked. “It will be better this time.”
“No,” I said again. “I’ll stay at home, you guys can go without me.”
“She’s scared of heights,” Cheetah said. “You know.”
I gave him a look. “No, I’m not.”
“Whatever,” he said.
Breakneck Ridge was a hiking trail our parents insisted on dragging us to last summer. We were halfway up when we had to climb across an endless stretch of sheer rock, and I almost hyperventilated. Dad sat in the car with me while Mom and Cheetah finished the trail without us.
Mom turned to me. “We’ll only go halfway up.”
“I’ll still stay home,” I said. “And don’t sign me up for rock climbing either.”
Mom sighed. “How will you get better if you don’t keep putting yourself out there? Remember, the best way to conquer fear is to face it.”
“I don’t need to get better! Next you’ll say I have to go bungee jumping.”
“Boing boing,” Cheetah said, giggling.
“Okay, new subject,” Mom said, seeing my face. “How was school today?”
I didn’t feel like talking about that either, so we listened to Cheetah’s glowing report of how he’d made two new spelling friends in addition to his two best friends who were already spellers. Which, if you think about it, is mind-boggling, unless Dobbs Ferry has the highest proportion of elementary school spelling geeks this side of the Hudson.
“I discovered a problem in class,” Dad said. “The math books have the wrong answers.”
“What?” Cheetah said. “They solved the problems wrong?”
The answers were correct, Dad said, but listed under the wrong chapters in the back of the book. “We have to ship everything back. I don’t know what Peter will think.”
“Why would he care?” Cheetah asked.
“Oh, he’s very bright. He knew everything on the test I gave him on the first day.”
“Who’s Peter?” Mom asked.
“The boy next door,” Cheetah said. “He moved in with his mom.”
“Oh.” She glanced at me. “I ran into her at the station this morning.”
“You know them?” Cheetah asked.
Mom cleared her throat. “They were friends of Margaret and Allie.”
“Did you know Peter’s dad died falling off a building?” Cheetah said suddenly. I guess he couldn’t keep it to himself anymore.
“Oh, Cheet.” Dad sighed. “It was a long time ago. I think we should all put it behind us.”
I stared at my tofu. Why did Cheetah have to tell everything? I knew what was coming next.
“Myla, are you okay?” Dad asked.
“Of course I’m okay. I didn’t fall off a building.”
“Myla, that’s not funny,” Mom said.
“I’m not trying to be!” Why would anyone think I was joking?
Mom and Dad looked at each other. Mom opened her mouth and then I could see Dad shake his head slightly, as if to say, Don’t go there.
“Well, maybe Breakneck Ridge would be a good idea,” Mom finally said. “A good first step.”
Was my mother crazy? “I’m fine right where I am,” I said.
But now she was craning her neck to the hall. “Wait, did you hear that?”
“What is it, Rani?” Dad asked.
Mom got up from the table. “It sounded like someone at the door.”
No one else had heard anything. But now we were curious, so we followed her to the hall. “The porch squeaked,” Mom said. She opened the door and we peered out. But there was no one.
“Maybe it was a cat,” Dad said. “Or the wind.”
But then Cheetah turned on the hall light. “Look at the door! On the front!”
And that’s when we all saw it.
Mom used soap and Lysol, but nothing got it out.
“It’s a Sharpie,” Cheetah said. “Everyone knows Sharpies don’t come out.”
Meanwhile, I stood on our porch, staring at the four black vertical lines on the door. I knew what they were. I’d been marked. I looked toward Peter’s house. Had he been marked, too?
“Myla, where are you going?” Mom called out as I walked quickly down our front path.
“She’s going to the neighbors,” Cheetah said. Then I heard him walking loudly behind me.
“Stop following me. You’re being too noisy.”
He jogged next to me, stepping on twigs. “How do you know they’ve got those lines, too?”
“I don’t. Shush!” We stopped short of Peter’s porch, which was unlit, but the streetlight was bright enough to see their front door.
“Nothing,” Cheetah said. I walked back and forth slowly to make sure. He was right.
Back on our porch, Mom was waiting. “Come inside. I have no idea who did this, but that doesn’t mean you have to go around the neighborhood looking at everyone’s door.”
“We weren’t going everywhere, just next door,” Cheetah said. “Right, Myla?”
“Buzz off,” I said.
He gave me a hurt look, and went inside.
“Myla, that wasn’t fair,” Mom said. “Remember, he’s your little brother.”
“But he’s always in my face. Sometimes I have to figure things out on my own.”
Mom tried to put an arm around me. “You don’t have to do it all on your own,” she said softly. “What’s bothering you?”
I shrugged her arm off. “Nothing!” I ran back inside.
The whole conversation made me angry. I didn’t want my mom’s help. But more than that, I was angry because she was right. I was being horrible, but I couldn’t stop myself. I was worried, and Cheetah had this uncanny way of knowing how I felt, even when no one else did. Soon he would be announcing to Mom and Dad how Myla was afraid that the lines on the door were meant for her.
Inside, I overheard Dad and Cheetah talking and cleaning up in the kitchen.
“It happened a long time ago,” Dad was telling him. “But it left an impression on her.”
“But why didn’t she tell me?” Cheetah wanted to know. “I would get it.”
“We know that. You’re a great brother. Just give her some time, Cheet.”
I caught Cheetah’s eyes, and I knew they were talking about me. I’d heard it all before: He was a great brother, and I was the worst sister in the world.
Ever since I could remember, I was walking into conversations like that where one of my parents was explaining to Cheetah something awful about me that wasn’t his fault. When I wouldn’t let him go trick-or-treating with Ana and me, or watch Pirates of the Caribbean with us when she came for a sleepover. Or how I didn’t share my roasted marshmallow with him after we made it in the backyard grill, even when I threw half of it away in the garbage.
It’s a phase, they would say. She doesn’t like to share Ana, they would say. And I would pretend they were right so I didn’t have to think about it. But the truth was, I felt bad every time, and I wondered what was wrong with me. Why was it so easy for Cheetah to be friends with my friends, or find kids who were exactly like him, when I had to work so hard to get what I had? And by the way, that marshmallow took me ages to crisp exactly right. It wasn’t my fault it gave me a stomachache afterward.
I couldn’t listen to Cheetah and Dad anymore. So I went to look at the front door again. Three lines made a fence. Now I understood what Peter meant. But there were four lines on my door. Did that make a difference? Craggy had said the Fencers would come after me. But how did they know where I lived? Unless someone else knew, someone who was marking my door for them. I shivered.