When We Get There

by Shauna Seliy

  That didn't help change his expression. I looked down and started shoveling again. I wished that we didn't have any police in Banning. A lot of people thought we shouldn't and that we only had them because the other towns did. People liked better to do their own policing. When Mr. D'Angelo was sent to look into a burglary, or a vandalism, or a killing, people handed him a tough time, lied to him, turned quiet at his questions. Most of the time they weren't staying quiet to protect anyone in particular; they just wanted to keep the law in their own hands, and out of his.

  He spent some time walking back and forth between our place and his car. I kept working at the snow. He made up his mind and got in the car. When he pulled away, snow sprayed up from under his tires.

  My dad backed out of the garage slow and careful and left the car running. He stepped out singing to me, "Hey, hey, Lucas. Need a ride to school, Lucas? In my fancy aquamarine car, Lucas?" I was supposed to sing back. But I just said, "No, I don't think I do." He pinned my arms to my sides and lifted me off my feet. We'd shoveled the snow from the drive into a big pile. I was expecting him to push me into it headfirst, but, instead, he set me down on top and planted a kiss in my hair.

  "I'm going to have some breakfast," he said. He went in through the garage and pulled down the door. The gears on the garage door were rusted and usually they made a big grating noise, but the snow had a way of making everything quiet. I hardly heard my mother when she said, "Lucas, get off there. Your pants will be soaked through." She was standing at the bottom of the porch steps with Mrs. D'Angelo. I rolled off the pile of snow and walked over to them.

  Mrs. D'Angelo pulled a cigarette out of her coat pocket and put it in her mouth. She didn't light it. It wasn't that she was so good-looking—her eyes were deep-set and ringed with dark circles—it's more that when she was standing in front of me, I couldn't remember what other people looked like. She stuck her long, pale hand inside her coat pocket, pulled out another cigarette, and held it out to me. I didn't make any move to take it. My mother nodded at me, impatiently, to go ahead. Mrs. D'Angelo still hadn't lit hers, and she didn't take out her matches. She pretended to take a puff and then blew out a long breath above my head. On account of the cold, it trailed away from us like smoke. Once, at a wedding at the club, she spent a good part of the reception tying the stems of cherries into knots with her tongue. When she was through, she arranged them on the table, in a display.

  My mother and I started back toward the house, but Mrs. D'Angelo stood still with her unlit cigarette in her mouth, staring after us.

  "Mirjana," she said to my mother, "soon?"

  My mother nodded. She took the cigarette I was holding and then tugged me inside. We were in the hall kicking the snow off our boots when my father came out of the kitchen and said to me, "Let's go."

  My mother said, "He hasn't eaten yet and his pants are soaking wet."

  "Are your pants wet? What kind of operation are we running here?"

  My mother said, "I want to take him. And I want the car. I'd like to go for a drive and see the snow."

  "A drive to see the snow?"

  "That's right."

  He moved in close like he was going to kiss her, but he stopped and said, "Except for the fact that you look a little like Hedy Lamarr, I don't think I've ever seen you before."

  We dropped him off at the mine and drove away in the direction of the school, but after a few minutes we switched roads and went to Mrs. D'Angelo's house. She was waiting inside her living room, looking for us out the window. When she came out of her house, I saw that she'd changed her hair; it was wrapped up in a bun on the back of her head. She was still wearing her green coat and she had a bag tucked under her arm, a traveling bag.

  Before she got in the car, I said, "Where are we going?"

  My mother told me to get into the back seat. When I got back there, she turned around and looked at me. "We know how to have a secret," she said. "Me and you. We know."

  We were sitting in a cafeteria someplace in West Virginia, my mother and Mrs. D'Angelo drinking coffee, when she told us that Frank kept five shotguns in their pantry. Mostly she was a quiet person, and had a careful way of waiting to say something, but she was talking so much that she hardly had a chance to drink her coffee. "He always says he won't tell me where the cartridges are so that I won't go out on some kind of spree, like Bonnie and Clyde. But it wouldn't be like that, it'd just be me. Well, maybe I'd pick someone up along the way." She looked at me and said, "A handsome someone, like Lucas here."

  I felt a powerful heat in the back of my neck.

  She said, "Mirjana, isn't it something how on Jimmy those blue eyes are so sparkly, but on Lucas, they're all broody and dark."

  My mother was sitting next to me in the booth. "Look here, L," she said, and turned my face toward her. "They are not broody," she said to Mrs. D'Angelo.

  "They are too," Mrs. D'Angelo said. "Like the water back in the Bluebird mine pond."

  The waitress came over and refilled their coffees. Mrs. D'Angelo waited for her to go away, then said, "I bet Frank won't tell me where those cartridges are because he's worried I'll blow off his head one morning while he's frying an egg."

  My mother laughed a little. "Oh, Rose." She put her arm around me and scratched the back of my head. She did this when she was bored or when she was nervous, or when we were out someplace with my father and she wanted to go home but couldn't say so. Later, when Zoli was around and she did this, it meant it was me and her against him.

  Mrs. D'Angelo said, "That's usually how it happens with people. Frank will tell you, it's the people closest to you, the people who supposedly can't live without you, will do the crudest things—cut you into bits and put you in a teapot . . . I can't figure it out, how it happens . . . When it comes for you, though, love, the bad kind, maybe even the good kind, if there is such a thing, you do get a close-up look at what you're made of. Most people probably aren't real happy with what they end up seeing . . ." Her voice trailed off and she stared at the table.

  My mother stirred her coffee. I watched Mrs. D'Angelo hold on to her thought. In the back of the restaurant, a waitress dropped a tray. The cook shouted. People at the next table helped each other with their coats and the air stirred around us. Mrs. D'Angelo shook her head a little, took a sip of coffee. She said, "Frank will tell you about the things he's seen, the things that happen to people. I mean, if you got the fortitude to pry the words out of him, he'll tell you."

  My mother nodded and went up to the register to the pay the bill.

  It was just me and Mrs. D'Angelo at the table. I looked around. The restaurant wasn't as nice as the ones in Brilliant. I'd never been in West Virginia before. It had taken us an hour or so of driving to get there. Mrs. D'Angelo lit another cigarette. She said, "So how about it, Lucas, you and me? We'll steal Marko Markovics Nash one night when they're at the club," she blew out a long puff of smoke, "then we'll light out for the territory"

  The heat on my neck moved up to my face and set off a buzzing in my ears.

  She said, "Oh come on, I know you'd like to go out for a ride in that pretty black car. See some of the country."

  "Okay. I'll go," I said.

  She laughed and raised her eyebrows. "I think you might do it. I think you just might."

  My mother came back to the table and rested her hand on Mrs. D'Angelo's shoulder. She said, "Girl at the register told me the temperature's going to drop again tonight. Snow could make the roads slow going."

  Mrs. D'Angelo looked behind me out the window and said, "What's the gal at the register know? Weather isn't her line of work."

  My mother picked up the pack of cigarettes and studied them. She said, "I'm just saying. It's not too late to, you know, go home, make it for another day"

  Mrs. D'Angelo tapped the pack of cigarettes in my mother's hand, and said, "You can have one, Mirjana. Go ahead."

  "You know I don't smoke," my mother said. And she didn't, but she sat down and lit one up.


  Mrs. D'Angelo pulled a sour apple hardtack candy out of her purse and gave it to me. I bit down on it and the candy cracked. She put her hand against my chin and said, "You'll break your teeth." She held her hand steady. I didn't move until she let go.

  She raised up her arm and waved to someone outside. There were people walking up and down the sidewalk, and cars on the road. I couldn't see who she was waving to.

  She said, "He's here, Mirjana. He showed."

  My mother nodded. "Tell him to come inside and say hi."

  Mrs. D'Angelo stood up, smoothed out the front of her dress, and pulled on her green coat. She said, "I don't think so. He's out there in his car. It'd be a to-do."

  My mother said, "Come on, bring him in. Let me have a look."

  She shook her head and said, "Thanks for the ride, Mirjana. Thanks for all you did for me."

  She leaned down and kissed me just next to my mouth. Her lips were wet with coffee and lipstick. She held them against my face longer than I was used to people doing. She had a deep cigarette and perfume smell all through her hair and her coat. When she pulled away from me, it was like being inside a cloud.

  After she walked away from the table, I said, "Where's she going? Who's out there?"

  "She's making her way, I guess," my mother said, her voice all soft and full of air.

  "Making her way where?"

  She watched Mrs. D'Angelo walk out of the place. She said, "We know how to have a secret?"

  I nodded.

  "You aren't to tell anyone that we came down here today. It's just us that knows about this. I can't be sure, but I don't think Rose D'Angelo will be around town anymore. And you can't say to a soul that you saw her here. Not your dad. Not Slats. Especially not Slats. She can talk, my mother, can't help herself." She pulled her purse close to her and snapped it shut. "Now I'm going to the ladies' and then me and you are going home."

  I went outside to see if I could get a look at the man Mrs. D'Angelo had gone off with. I walked to the end of the block looking in all the parked cars. Then I saw, on the next block, a flash of Mrs. D'Angelo's green coat. I ran after her, my shoes slipping on the snow. When I got close enough, I saw that she was by herself. I stopped running and watched. From the way she was walking, sort of slow and distracted, I got a feeling that she wasn't going anywhere in particular, that maybe there was no man in a car. She was alone.

  All of a sudden, I couldn't think of anything but Marko Markovic's Nash. On nice days, he was always polishing it, and it would shine in the sun like a piece of wet coal. My mother said that car was the love of his life. But he never took it anywhere, it just sat still in the driveway all the time looking nice.

  I turned around and walked back toward the restaurant. Mrs. D'Angelo's sour apple candy had melted, but the taste of it was still in my mouth.

  Later that night, we drove to the Croatian Club. Usually we walked, but my mother said her bones would break if she had to walk in that cold. When we got in the car, my father said he didn't want to go to the club right away. He said he wanted my mother to show him where she'd gone out driving to look at the snow. He was eyeing her when he said it, suspicious, and it made me nervous, but she said, "Okay, doll," without showing a flicker of worry.

  She guided him around, down one street and up another. It was a good trick. She picked nice-looking roads, big spiny trees leaning over them, branches heavy with snow. With the moon out as big as it was, the branches seemed to glow. I got an idea that the thing that made a person grow up was how many secrets they had, how big the secrets were, and how good they were at holding on to them.

  A cop car came up behind us flashing its lights.

  "Is that for us, Mirjana?" my dad said. "Lucas," he said, "look and see if that's for us."

  My mother said, "Just pull over, Jim. If he doesn't want us, he'll pass us up."

  "I wasn't speeding."

  "There aren't any other cars out here, Dad."

  We pulled over. The cop left the lights on and they flashed into the woods on both sides of the road, lighting up the snow-covered mountain laurels and white sycamores. He didn't come up to the driver's side like they always do. Instead, he knocked on my mother's window. She rolled it down.

  My father leaned over and looked up at the cop. He said, "Oh Jesus, Frank, you scared the hell out of me. Mirjana, it's just Frank."

  She stared ahead at the road.

  "Frank D'Angelo," my father said to her, as if they'd been arguing about who he was and my father was insisting on it. I sunk down a little in the back. My mother blinked at the lights swinging through the car.

  Mr. D'Angelo leaned down so that his eyes were level with my mother's. He looked at her for a long time, and then said, "You seen Rose?"

  My father nudged her shoulder, but she didn't say anything, just slowly shook her head. My father said to Mr. D'Angelo, "Everything okay, Frank?"

  Mr. D'Angelo said to my mother, "You haven't seen her then?" This time his voice was harder.

  My mother didn't say anything, or move. My father seemed like he didn't know what to do. He said, "Mirjana?"

  Mr. D'Angelo said, "There was a bag. She took a bag."

  Nobody said anything. My father looked down. My mother kept staring ahead. The lights from the patrol car were swinging through the windows and passing over us, and the inside of the car seemed to billow out like a sail. I realized that my mother's skin was running pale because she was afraid, something I'd never known her to be.

  I leaned forward and said, "I seen her."

  Mr. D'Angelo and my dad both looked at me, but my mother didn't turn around.

  "On my way home from school," I said. "I saw her walking down at the creek."

  My father nodded and said, "All right then, Frank?"

  Mr. D'Angelo didn't answer.

  My father said, "We're on our way down the club. If we see her there, we'll send her home to you. Maybe she went for a drink. Nice night for a warm drink."

  Mr. D'Angelo held on to the car door for a while, then let go and walked to his car. He turned off his flashing lights and pulled onto the road away from us. My father asked again if my mother had seen Rose. She said no, just for coffee that morning. He put the car in drive and we got back on the road.

  Without taking her eyes off my father, my mother reached back and put her hand on the side of my face. I had a wide scar under my right eye, a patch where my skin was whiter. My mother always claimed it wasn't a scar. It looked the way it looked, she said, because she'd kissed me there so often that the skin was wearing away. It was true that whenever she kissed me goodbye or hello or for just no reason, for as long as I could remember, that was nearly always where she landed the kiss. Just then, she ran her finger over the spot.

  When we got home that night, I saw that Marko's black Nash was sitting where it always was, just a little ways in the drive, close to the road, as if he might pull out at any minute and go off somewhere. After my parents went inside, I walked across the street to take a closer look. Its shiny black paint showed through the places where the snow wasn't thick on it.

  I wiped the snow off the windows and looked at the brown seats, the polished steering wheel. I hadn't told my mother that I'd seen Mrs. D'Angelo walk off alone. I think I had an idea that I would get in the Nash and go out driving until I found her in her green coat. The two of us would light out for the territory, like she'd said, and then come back to town. I tried the doors, but they were locked, or maybe they were frozen. My hands stung touching the handles.

  I hadn't believed my mother when she said that Mrs. D'Angelo wouldn't be coming back to town. It wasn't that I thought she was lying to me; it was that I didn't understand yet that it was possible to put a few things in a bag and walk away from everything you knew, and just keep walking. My mother, though, I guess she knew.

  Chapter 4

  After Christmas, Slats made us switch from sleeping at my house to staying at hers, where she said she had easier access to the things she needed to f
end off Zoli. She borrowed a six-inch hunting knife from one of her brothers and stowed it under the couch. I could see it shining when I pulled my shoes out from under there. I started out sleeping on that couch, but after she caught me two nights in a row trying to slip out to go back to my house, she took up the couch herself and put me in her room.

  Her bed had a white lacy cover that looked like it should have been wrapped around a box of Kleenex. Next to it was a TV stand that, instead of having a TV on it, was covered with figurines of St. Francis. Slats was tall as could be, with real long legs—that's how she got that nickname—and she had a heavy way of walking. When she was going from room to room, the St. Francises clinked together. I tried to space them apart so they wouldn't do that, but the tray was too crowded. The window above the bed faced the Plate Glass. I didn't like sleeping at her house in the doily bedspread next to the St. Francises, but I liked the noises the machines made at the Glass, their humming and screeching. When they were running a big order, they kept at it all night. Maybe it was because of the things that were happening then, or maybe all thirteen-year-olds are like this, but I liked it best of all when things broke; the noise of glass shattering would ring out over the street. I'd stand still waiting and hoping for more of it.

  After she moved us around, Slats started locking the windows and pushing chairs against the doors at night, to keep me inside, she said, and Zoli outside. But Zoli didn't show at the Plate Glass when the holiday was over; day after day, he missed his shift and never called in to say why. Slats seemed to favor him disappeared, but I would have liked better to know where he was.

  "If he's not coming to the Glass, where's he at?" I asked her.

  "He's just laying low. Hiding out in his place. He's probably more scared of us than we are of him."

  "I'm not scared of him," I said, but I was thinking about him out in the Skylark, circling us and circling us, gas cans rattling against each other in the back, packs of matches sliding across the dash.