Lily's Crossing

by Patricia Reilly Giff

  But he wouldn’t let go. “Let me give you this money,” he said slowly, “if it is important. It is important money.”

  She took another breath. She knew she wouldn’t find the purse today. It was so dark below, and it could be hours. She nodded and climbed back up on the wharf.

  “It’s for Margaret,” she told him, going over to unroll the towel, sitting on the bench. She showed him Eddie’s picture, with his buck teeth smiling up at them. Then she said the rest in a rush, the words spilling out, trying to make him see what Eddie was like, how much Margaret loved him, how Margaret couldn’t remember his face, how she had to send the picture, how . . .

  Albert listened; then he touched the edge of the picture. “I cannot remember Ruth’s face,” he said. “I can remember Nagymamma’s. She was sitting in the back of her restaurant the day we went away. She was sewing my coat. The collar was wet when she gave it back to me. It was wet from where she was crying. It crackled when I felt it.

  “There is money,” he said slowly. “It is in the coat collar. It is Magyar, Hungarian money, and English money, and American money. Nagymamma said when I touched it again to remember . . .” He stopped.

  Lily wanted to ask him “Remember what?” but he looked so sad, she just nodded, and used the towel to dry her face.

  Chapter 17

  “

  Lillllyyyy.” The voice was loud, sharp.

  Her grandmother was standing at the other end of the road, hand shading her eyes.

  Caught.

  Lily stood there, trying to decide what to do. Then she handed the rolled-up towel with the picture to Albert. “Don’t drop it,” she whispered.

  “Lilllllyyyy,” the voice came again.

  “What?” She stood there; she didn’t move. Gram always wanted her to come when she called, as if she were a cat.

  “Lillllyyy.”

  She gritted her teeth. “Hold on to that with your life, Albert.” She started back along the path toward Gram, biting her lip as the gravel jabbed into her feet.

  “It’s hard to believe you’re walking all over the place wearing that bathing suit,” Gram said as soon as Lily got close enough to hear. “And where are your shoes? Any minute you’re going to get a splinter. Blood poison next. Besides,” she rushed on, “you look like a hoyden. I don’t know what people will think.”

  Hoyden. Lily didn’t even know what it meant. She sighed, a huge sigh. Let Gram see she thought she was acting like a pain. “I’m going swimming.”

  “At the fishing dock?”

  “Well . . .”

  “It’s time to practice the piano, Lily.”

  “I’m not—” Lily began.

  “Yes,” Gram said. “Your father spent all that money to bring that piano here all the way from St. Albans. For you.”

  “Poppy doesn’t care.” Lily shifted from one foot to the other. A stone was digging right through her skin into her bones. Gram was right. She was going to end up with blood poisoning, and Margaret was never going to get Eddie’s picture.

  “You were the one who wanted piano lessons,” Gram said.

  Lily could see beads of perspiration on Gram’s upper lip. It was hot as a blister, and they were probably going to stand there arguing forever.

  Gram was right, though. The piano lessons were all her own idea. But that was last winter. How was she to know that it took forever to learn the piano, that you couldn’t even play a decent song like “Mairzy Doats” or “Swinging On a Star” unless you spent your whole life sitting at the piano bench, while everyone else in the whole world was—

  “Will you stop daydreaming, Lily?” Gram said. “Get yourself home. Change out of that bathing suit, and practice for a half hour.”

  Lily didn’t wait to hear the rest. Head up, she marched up the road and headed for home.

  She threw the bathing suit on the shower floor, put on a pair of shorts and a top, and went to the piano bench. The back door closed a moment later. Gram was home.

  Lily looked up at the old alarm clock on top of the piano. One o’clock. She watched the hands for a while. It almost seemed as if they weren’t moving. She stood up and put her ear next to it. It was still ticking, but slowly. It would take forever to get to one-thirty.

  “Lily?” Gram called from the kitchen.

  She curled her fingers over the keys and started in on the C scale. At the same time, she looked out the window. The sea was tinged with green. Her father would say it had something to do with algae. There was only the slightest swell now, a perfect afternoon to teach Albert to swim.

  She closed her eyes, picturing the troop ship they had seen, huge and ghostly in the mist. For a moment she thought about what it would be like if they could do it. Wouldn’t it be something if they could get the rowboat close enough to swim the last few feet, the last few yards? Wouldn’t it be something if she could teach Albert to swim well enough for that? Even if he could just keep himself afloat, she could help him. And even if it wasn’t Poppy’s ship, it would be going to Europe. Albert could get to Ruth, and she—

  Gram was standing at the living room door. “What are you daydreaming about?” she asked.

  Lily frowned. “How much I hate this piano.”

  “Just try,” Gram said. “You can do anything if you really work at it. And you love music.”

  Lily didn’t answer. She started the C scale over and didn’t look up until Gram was rattling around in the kitchen again.

  You can do anything.

  Could she?

  What was she thinking of, anyway? What she had to be doing was getting Eddie’s picture wrapped and mailed before the post office closed at four. Instead, she was stuck in front of the piano, the keys a little dusty, with the John Thompson book in front of her.

  She played the C scale as loudly as she could, up and down, faster, faster. It made a terrific noise. She could hear Gram bang a cabinet door shut. Lily was probably driving her crazy. Terrific. She played around with her hand down low at the bass . . . making up some Hazel Scott boogie music as she went along.

  “Lily.”

  Back to the C scale. The loudest C scale anyone had ever heard.

  Nothing from the kitchen.

  Lily began to flip through the John Thompson book. Etudes, mazurkas (whatever they were), waltzes. “The Blue Danube.”

  She picked the music out with one finger. Da da da da dum dum. She knew that, she’d heard it before. And that was Albert’s river.

  She leaned over to reach Gram’s atlas in the bookshelf. It was heavy and smelled of the attic in St. Albans. She put it down next to her on the bench and went through the pages, A Africa, Antilles. G Germany. That was the Nazi place. It showed a little of Hungary on the edge. Aid there was H Hungary two pages later. She tried to spot Budapest, or the Danube River, but all she could find were a bunch of black lines wandering up and down on a yellow blotch that looked like the piece of a puzzle.

  In the center of the book was a map of the whole world. She ran her finger across it . . . from Hungary, to Austria, to Switzerland, to France. She smiled a little. Madeline in the book had been there. She remembered that. Madeline was in Paris.

  And so was Ruth.

  Lily started in on “The Blue Danube” again with one finger of her right hand, and added some dum dum’s with the left hand.

  Footsteps were coming around the side of the house. She stood up, still playing, as the top of Albert’s head passed the window, then backed up, and his face came into view.

  “I thought we were going to . . .” He held up the rolled-up towel.

  “Lily, are you playing?” Gram called.

  “Hold your horses,” Lily told Albert. “I can’t get out of here for another twenty-two minutes.”

  “Lily,” Gram called again.

  Lily stretched up on the bench to get a good look at Albert. “Besides,” she told him, “I’ve got a surprise for you. Listen to what I’m playing. It’s for you, special.”

  She plunked herself
down on the bench again and began to play “The Blue Danube” as nicely as she could.

  After a minute, she heard a noise. Was that Albert laughing again? She ended “The Blue Danube” with a crash and began the C scale again.

  She could hear Gram at the back door telling Albert to come in for some iced tea while he waited. Good grief. She opened the John Thompson book to the piece she knew best, the piece she had played a million times last winter. She could hear Gram and Albert talking in the kitchen. The clock wasn’t moving.

  She began to play. She hit the wrong note with her left pinky. It sounded horrible. For a minute there was silence the kitchen.

  Lily went back to the C scale, played it one last time, but softly now, as if she knew what she was doing. Then she slid off the seat and went into the kitchen. Albert and Gram were talking about music, but not about the piano, about violin music. Albert was telling Gram about the lessons he had taken, and Gram, her head to one side, was listening, nodding.

  “Come on, Albert,” Lily said, feeling ready to scream, “We’ve got stuff to do, remember? We can’t hang around here all day.”

  Chapter 18

  They were at Margaret’s house, sitting on the kitchen floor, with Albert’s coat in front of them. The coat was navy blue wool, scratchy against Lily’s fingers. She poked Gram’s manicure scissors into the collar seam, trying to slide the points under the tiny stitches. Albert was leaning over her shoulder, and Paprika was playing with her sneaker lace.

  Lily could feel the perspiration running down her back, the metal scissors sliding in her slippery fingers, when Albert began to talk, grinning. “Hungarians play ‘The Blue Danube’ too,” he said. “It never sounded like that.”

  “Like what?”

  He looked down at the coat. “Like terrible. Like Ruth plays.” He smiled. “Ruth likes to play duets. Loud.”

  Lily swallowed. “I don’t want to play the piano anyway. It takes too much time, and . . .” She’d probably like Ruth. “You should try it,” Lily said. “Hanging around on the bench, trying to . . .”

  “In my grandmother’s restaurant,” Albert said slowly, “I played the violin on Sunday. I played that song, and ‘Vienna Life,’ which is my grandmother’s favorite.” He stopped. “I loved the violin, Lily. If only I could have taken it with me . . .”

  He took a breath. “In Kalocsa’s, Nagymamma’s restaurant, people ate goulash. They had rolls with sweet butter. For dessert they ate rigojancsi, and gesztenyepüre, or palacsintas.”

  “What . . .”

  “Palacsintas are pancakes. They’re filled with jam, or chocolate.”

  Lily looked up.

  “Nagymamma gave me plain ones, cold ones, folded over. She put them in my coat pocket when I left.”

  Lily knew he was ready to cry, but she couldn’t think what to say. She just kept snipping at the collar until there was a wide opening in the seam. Without looking, she pushed the coat toward him and watched as he edged his thumb and index finger gently into the seam. He worked the bills out, laying each one on the floor next to them. “These are Magyar money,” he said. “We call them forints. And this one is an English pound.”

  He didn’t have to tell her about the next, a fifty-dollar bill, worn and creased. “Nagymamma did not know where we were going. She had to guess about the money.”

  Lily looked at him, thinking about going to another country without Poppy or Gram, without even knowing where she was going. “Where is . . . ,” she began.

  Albert reached down for the cat. He held her up to his face, rubbing her soft fur on his cheek. “Nagymamma might be in her house. She might be in prison. I do not know.”

  Lily thought of her own mother, who had died, but had died of something wrong with her heart, and not in prison, but at home in St. Albans. Lily touched the money on the floor beside her, patted it the way she patted her stars. It was as if she could almost see Albert’s grandmother, who had touched it last.

  The cat put its tiny needle claws into Albert’s shoulder as he reached over to put his fingers into the coat seam again. And now there was a tiny picture with three faces. Albert, of course, with that mop of hair, and an old woman, with a lined face and little round glasses, and a girl. The girl had curls like Albert’s, but they were softer, smoother, and she was laughing.

  “Ruth,” Lily said.

  “Yes.” Albert looked down at the picture again; then put it carefully in his pocket. He folded most of the money and put that in his pocket too. Then he handed her the fifty dollars. “Here, for Eddie’s picture.”

  She looked down at the money. “We can’t—”

  “My grandmother would not mind. She would be glad, I think.”

  Lily shook her head. “Don’t you see? We could never go to the post office with all this money. They’d ask where we’d gotten it. They’d tell my grandmother.”

  Albert raised one shoulder. “It is too much money, then?”

  “More than I’ve ever seen at once,” Lily said.

  Albert scooped up the money and stuffed it back into the coat. He sat back on his heels, and put the cat down on the floor. “I guess we should not use the Hungarian money. That is not so much.”

  Lily grinned. “I don’t think so. Nobody around here has ever seen Hungarian money.”

  “No.” He grinned back.

  But then Lily heard the church bells. Four times. Four o’clock. The post office was closed, and poor Margaret would have to go another day without the picture.

  Lily sighed. “I’ll teach you to swim, Albert. We’ll go over to the bay now, and I’ll figure out how to get money before tomorrow.”

  “Not the bay,” he said, “the ocean.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I do not know what that means, ‘ridiculous.’ ”

  She narrowed her eyes. He knew very well what it meant. “You can’t learn to swim in that rough water.”

  He reached forward to grab her arm. “Do you know that Ruth is waiting for me? Do you know that summer will be over and I will have to go back to Canada . . .”

  She nodded. “I’ll have to go back to St. Albans, and Sister Benedicta in the sixth grade.”

  “Please.” He was holding her arm so hard now she could feel each one of his fingers tightening around it. His eyes were so blue, and she knew it was never going to happen the way he wanted, and it was all her fault . . . all because of her wild stories.

  “Oh yes, Lily. I will learn to swim, and you will row.”

  She stuck out her lower lip. “If you want to learn, it’ll be faster in the bay. And that’s my final offer.”

  “I do not know what that means,” he said.

  “You don’t have to.” She unwrapped his hand from her arm and scrambled to her feet. “I’m going to put Eddie’s picture back in the living room now, and then I’m going to the bay to swim. If you want to come with me, fine. If not, too bad.”

  She marched into the living room and dusted the end table with her arm. She thought of Eddie on a beach in Normandy. She’d seen newspaper pictures: Nazi pillboxes set into the rocks, firing; soldiers in the sand, some of them dead, everything confused. They had to get off the beaches before they could begin to free the French cities.

  Lily put Eddie’s picture on the table and ran her fingers over his face. “Be just a little lost,” she whispered. He was smiling in the picture, and she could remember him smiling the same way when she had met him coming out of the movie, or at Mrs. Sherman’s, or on the way to church. She wondered if he could count as a friend even though he was much older. “What do you think, Eddie?” she asked.

  “Ruth talks to herself all the time,” Albert said.

  Lily marched past him and out the door. “Are you coming?”

  Albert looked up at the ceiling, blinking, trying to decide.

  At the same moment, Paprika darted between their legs and out the door.

  Albert reached for her, and so did Lily.

  She was halfway down the
path before they caught up. “She’s growing,” Lily said, scooping the cat into her arms and bringing her into the house.

  Albert nodded. “I could bring her back to Canada, I think.”

  “Good,” Lily said.

  “But I am not going back to Canada,” Albert said. “Remember? I am going to Europe.”

  “And I’m going to the bay,” Lily said.

  “I guess I will come too,” he said.

  Lily didn’t answer. She marched out the door, taking a deep breath.

  Chapter 19

  Lily had dreamed about Margaret, and Eddie too, but when she awoke, she couldn’t remember much more than that. She knew she had been crying in the dream. She was still crying when she opened her eyes.

  Gram was standing next to her bed. “It was only a dream, Lily,” she said.

  Lily leaned up on one arm. Poppy had been in the dream, and Ruth, but Lily hadn’t seen her face, just her hair, dark and shiny like Albert’s, and there was something about Madeline, the book Madeline.

  Gram sat down on the edge of the bed. “What is it? What’s the matter?”

  “Things are never going to be the same,” she said. “Not even when the war is over. Albert might not have his grandmother. He might not have Ruth.”

  “Everything is so confused over there. A flood of people have come from the rest of Europe, soldiers . . .” Gram sighed. “If our army can get across France, if they can liberate Paris, then maybe someone can get to Ruth.” She shook her head. “But you’re right, Lily, things won’t be the same. We’ll all be changed, all of us who lived through this.”

  “But Poppy said it would be the same.”

  “I know.” Gram patted her shoulder. “He wanted it to be the same for you.”

  Lily took a breath. She thought of Margaret not remembering Eddie’s face. Lily could see his face so clearly, even without the picture.

  And Eddie’s picture was standing there on the Dillons’ living room table. It would take her only five minutes to wrap it and bring it down to the post office this morning. If only . . .