Paulina doesn’t seem sorry to make me sad. As a matter of fact, she perks up as she tells me all this, half a smirk on her face. Probably drunk.
She wants to hurt you.
Two things became clear to me in this moment.
One: My father cares more about losing money than he does about seeing us. Two: Paulina is too selfish and stupid to care how we feel—and she believes it’s okay for a father to act like this with his kids.
All I can think is “it stinks.”
She looks pretty, but she’s ugly inside.
I decide not to give away anything about any of it. Instead I say, “Thanks for telling me. Let me know what happens with my mother, all right?”
I turn and walk toward the front door. When I turn around, Paulina stares at me, confused.
“I’m going over to my friend’s. I have a homework project. I might be back late.”
“Not too late I hope. I’m making dinner. Come back by six thirty for dinner, okay?”
“I will.”
You thought she was the mother type, but she’s a freak.
Paulina struggles to scoop the cigarette ashes off the piano where the ashtray overflowed. I walk back over to her. “Do you think we could call Wendy later?”
I say it politely while I push the button on the side of the ashtray. The butt opens and the ashes spill in.
Paulina sits, amazed by the ashtray. “I don’t know, honey, I’m not sure she can take phone calls.”
My heart pounds through my blouse again and I can’t find my breath to say anything else. I stare at Paulina’s face. She seems pissed off. I guessed she’s mad at me because I didn’t show her the butt button before. I don’t care.
I walk out with my book bag, but I don’t know where to go. I have no friends. I do need to write an English paper, but since it’s Friday, I have all weekend to finish it.
What I want is to call Wendy to tell her I love her, but I realize that if Paulina is telling the truth it might never happen. I’ve been angry with Wendy, but at least she didn’t leave us and pretend to be living in Florida.
I can’t breathe.
Stashing my book bag behind the juniper bushes by the front porch, I walk along the cliff then follow the path down to the beach to my favorite sitting rock on the jetty. Before long, I’m breathing again.
I come up with a plan. I resolve to make sure that even if Wendy dies, my father and Paulina are never going to want to stay in Withensea and take care of us.
You’re better off in an orphanage.
Paulina seems to have a difficult time keeping secrets. I’m certain my father never wanted us to know he’d been staying in Withensea all this time. I also think Paulina shouldn’t have told me about Wendy. I remember how weird it was that she’d been crying when I came inside but got excited when she talked about the prospect of moving in, even after telling me how Wendy might die.
Her sadness didn’t have anything to do with Wendy’s dying. She was upset about something to do with my father’s leaving on a “drive.” What did he do to make Paulina cry? Whatever it is, it’s time for him to pay for all the bad things he’s done to Wendy and to us, and I am going to be the person that brings him down. Like Vito Corleone.
You, Jules Finn, will bring Howard Finn to justice, gangster-style.
We’d overheard many stories from Wendy regarding my father and his illegal activities. Mostly she listed petty crimes involving bilking people out of investment money for fake business enterprises. Wendy called him the “biggest con artist on the South Shore.” I wasn’t positive what this meant, but no one, not even my Aunt Doreen or the rest of his family, ever argued with her about this point.
I’d read one of Wendy’s books, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, recently, and I imagined my father lived a life out of the pages of the book, although I was pretty sure there wasn’t an Irish mafia. His personality fit the violent Corleone family profile, and once he’d practically murdered Wendy—we thought she was dead after he choked her unconscious in front of us during a fight they had in the car. My Aunt Doreen pounded on Wendy’s chest to make her breathe while Moses and I were trapped in the backseat. We had to watch the whole thing.
When he was choking her, her face turned all crimson-blue, and when she started breathing again it sounded like she was choking all over again.
Looking back, I had no idea that justice had already introduced itself to us. It turned out that my father was on probation for one of the petty crimes he’d committed in Florida. Probation created a fortunate and ultimately fate-changing chain of events, shaping the next few days and the rest of our interactions with him for years to come.
I need a dead fish.
First I go back to our shed to gather my fishing gear. Next I hike down to the dock at the yacht club, where we keep our dinghy tied. Jack, who sails, has been gifted by Wendy (which means my grandfather gave her money for something else) a Hobie sailboat he keeps anchored at the yacht club. We use the dinghy to fish and Jack uses it to row out to where the Hobie stays moored in the bay.
It’s a sixty-degree day in April. Warm for April in Massachusetts. But it gets cold fast when the sun goes down and near freezing at night. It’s about four o’clock and already chilly by the time I make it to the dock.
My school clothes are dirty because I stopped to dig earthworms. Moses and I use earthworms as bait because we can’t afford to buy sea worms.
I know I only have a little time.
There are rules about the dinghy—not the ones Wendy and I made, but rules the coast guard and the yacht club enforce.
Nobody has to wear a life preserver, but we’re supposed to have them on board for each of us. We follow the rule, and it’s good because Moses is a poor swimmer.
We aren’t allowed to use the dinghy from dusk to dawn. This rule is broken often. The best catches happen during the dusk and dawn, and we’re too focused on fishing to follow this rule. Besides, this one is Wendy’s rule and she never wakes up until ten in the morning. Later, at dusk, we know if she isn’t around she’ll never know, so then it doesn’t matter either.
One of the other rules I make Moses follow is that we, the ones who use the fishing dinghy (besides Jack), can’t go out without each other. I never break this rule because I try to set an example for Moses and I enjoy Moses’s company on our fishing adventures. We’re great fishing buddies. Besides, he’s only six and too little to go fishing on his own.
Anyway, I decide to break the rule and go by myself, but I plan to make it back by the six thirty dinner deadline Paulina set. I can’t risk any trouble with Paulina or my father.
You need to be the perfect daughter to make this work.
First I toss my pole into the dinghy, unscrew the oars, and row myself out across to our favorite spot, a rocky cove by the edge of a small island that sits east of ours. Within a few minutes I bait my hook with the worms from my pocket, put my line in, and wait for a bite.
I’m hoping for a rockfish, maybe a schoolie, but after fifteen minutes I’ve hooked a flounder that flops on my line in the dinghy. It’ll do. Catching anything is easier than I thought it would be. I start rowing back to shore.
I was nervous when I rowed across the bay because most of the folks at the yacht club know Jack, and they also know I’m not allowed out on my own. I can’t risk anyone seeing me and ratting me out. For this reason, I choose a longer route back that will leave me out in the open for a shorter time. I follow close to a row of saltboxes built out over a land bridge close to the end of the island. It’s a rougher job rowing back in because the tide runs in many different directions in this stretch. Originally the water flowed freely from ocean to bay at this spot, which was no more than a sandbar before the concrete walls and pavement were built to connect it to the rest of Withensea. But the bridge, which forces the existing currents to wind around its edges, has created complex wave and tide patterns.
By the time I make it back to the dock, I’m exhausted. My clothes are
wet with mud, saltwater, and fish juice.
I’ve learned to guess time from the angle of the sun and the shadows it throws, and I see I have about half an hour to make it back in time for dinner. Somehow I manage to tie the dinghy, secure the oars, run to our backyard, bury the fish in the garden, return my fishing gear to the shed, grab my book bag in the juniper bushes, and sneak back in with time to spare.
I use my secret entry route, which involves scaling a trellis nailed to the shingles directly under the bottom of the widow walk ledge on the second floor. From there it’s a quick balancing act along the ledge to my window, which I keep unlatched.
It’s funny the things you do when you aren’t afraid.
I shower to wash the fish smell off me and change into clean, dry clothing. At precisely six thirty I tie my sneakers and walk downstairs to join everyone for dinner.
Ten
Jules, 8 years | April, 1970
SALAD TRAUMA
IT BEGINS WITH iceberg lettuce.
Paulina prepares a huge salad as an appetizer.
We are as unfamiliar with the concept of appetizers as we are with fresh salad. We’ve only seen both at restaurants, where we rarely go.
Wendy considers appetizers needlessly fattening, appetite-spoiling foods. We’re never allowed to order them and we never order or eat salads, except whatever garnishes might be present on our plates. Also, Wendy doesn’t eat fresh fruits or vegetables, so she never buys them. Most of the fresh ones we’ve eaten have been at meals with our Aunt Doreen.
When we were younger, before the divorce, when she still cooked for my father and us, Wendy served canned peas, carrots, and beans. The worst was the canned asparagus she forced us all to try once, exclaiming, “Asparagus is a delicacy.”
Delicacy, I decided, is code for disgusting. I got sick after swallowing it.
I haven’t eaten a vegetable—besides the corn they ladle into school lunches—in years.
Judging by their obvious tentativeness as they stare at their own bowls, I doubt my brothers have either. Yet here we are, sitting in front of bowls filled with several different vegetables we know we’re required to eat every bite of. My father expects us to do this as a courtesy to Paulina.
Nestled in the iceberg lettuce lay sliced tomatoes, square-cut cucumbers, chopped green peppers, pink-laced onions, cut carrots, and an as-yet-unidentified small white vegetable whose variety and type I have never seen.
I wait for my father to pick up his fork, our sign to begin eating, when David yells out, “Ahhhhhh!” and thrusts his fingers into his bowl, extricating a wiggling white grub.
I stare at the grub in David’s fingers.
Paulina screams and jumps out of her seat.
Moses says, “Wow.” Moses likes bugs. I think he’s excited to have one join us at the table.
My brothers and I are simultaneously reminded of David’s potentially punishable etiquette breach. We all gape at my father while Paulina continues to scream.
My father, although rattled by the wiggling grub and Paulina’s screaming, manages to maintain his authority for the moment by asking David to remove the grub from the table. But as David pushes away from the table, my father makes the mistake of glancing down into his own bowl, an inevitable thought having crossed his mind before ours. He’s unprepared for what he sees. Evidently, crawling in his bowl are several of the same grubs.
He yells, and as he attempts to push his bowl away he dumps it across the table, where the grubs from his bowl lie wiggling between the dinnerware.
It’s really funny, but no one laughs.
Paulina begins a new round of screams, and Moses and I begin the excavation of our own bowls for grub family members. We find them easily. They are the (now-identifiable) small white vegetables I was wondering about.
“What’s the matter with you? Are you some kind of a moron?” my father snarls.
Paulina stops screaming and makes a small moaning sound, holding her face in her hands as she leans over and clutches the table.
David sits still in his chair, the wiggling grub in his fingers.
“Didn’t you wash these before you served them? How could you miss bugs crawling around in a salad? Clean up this mess, you idiot.”
Any pretense of polite behavior toward his new wife disappears. We scan Paulina for a reaction. She casts a dejected look downward. “Yeah, I guess I forgot to wash the lettuce.”
He snorts.
When he rages, he makes me think of an angry moose. His nostrils flare and his head goes down as though he’s ready to charge. We all wait, adrenaline pumping, to see what direction he’s headed. He stomps out, grabbing his keys and jacket on the way.
“I’m going out to dinner for a good meal. Maybe you’ll think about how to be a better cook while I’m gone.”
Instead of arguing, like Wendy would have, Paulina nods. “I’ll do better next time.”
“Good!” he shouts and slams the door.
After a few moments of silence, David yells, “Call Freddy!”
Moses and I laugh. Paulina sits there, confused.
We’re all relieved and thankful for his exit. This is an improvement from his behavior with Wendy. My brothers and I stare at one another, a bit shocked. We aren’t shocked at the shouting; we’re shocked Paulina didn’t get beaten. Our father’s verbal violence usually escalates. His previous exits usually followed a physical attack.
Paulina notices our shocked expressions. “He’s mad because I don’t know how to cook real good,” she says. “He’s been real patient with me. I’m still bad at it, though.”
Where all of my father’s traditional expectations for his wife to prepare well-made meals came from has always been a bit of a mystery. His sister, Doreen, is a great cook, but I’ve heard many times that his own mother wasn’t. She was a working mother and had no time to prepare meals. Doreen was the one who cooked for the family and took care of my father. Perhaps it fulfilled a fantasy for him—maybe he was trying to create the mother he never had out of his wives.
“Last night’s meal tasted good,” Moses says sweetly. David and I agree.
Paulina hangs her head.
Moses remains unfazed by the grubs.
David jumps up to clear the plates. “I’ll throw this all in the trash in the garage.”
Paulina heads into the kitchen. Before David leaves the table I whisper to my brothers, “Did Paulina say anything to you guys about Mom?”
“You mean that she might die?” David says casually.
Moses’s head snaps up. “What? Mom might die?”
“No sir. I don’t think it’s true,” I say, more for Moses than anything.
“No, I don’t think so either,” David adds, realizing the way his words are hitting Moses.
Moses’s eyes fill with tears and he pans from one to the other of us and shakes his head, not knowing what to believe.
I push back my chair and stand up from the table. I meet David’s eyes and roll mine at him. He rolls his back at me then gathers all our grubby salads and leaves for the trash.
“Don’t worry, Moses. She’ll live. We’re gonna call after dinner and talk to her.”
He lays his arms on the table and puts his head down. He needs dinner.
I follow Paulina into the kitchen to see what else she’s prepared. Something that smells like spicy bacon saturates the air and I’m hungry. I’m also certain I’ll eat about anything as long as it isn’t moving on my plate. I talk Paulina into serving us the rest of the dinner.
The four of us go back to the table, where Paulina tells us her family is part Polish and she’s cooked us a traditional Polish dinner. She calls it “boiled dinner with red cabbage”: thick-cut potatoes and a speckled, chopped meat called kielbasa. “Polish sausage,” she explains. It tastes spicy and exotic. We all love it.
Sometime later, my brothers and I try to phone Wendy in the hospital. Paulina sits on the couch beside me. A nurse tells me she’s checked out, the details of which
remain a mystery until I phone Jack, who’s been staying with his mother again, for information. Jack tells me Wendy has been moved to Mass General Hospital, where there are specialists for her type of spinal injury. My brothers listen on the other extensions when I ask him about Wendy’s chances for recovery.
“Whadya mean?” Jack asks.
“I heard she might, she might … die,” I say, unsure about my brothers’ reactions to this.
Jack remains silent for a moment. “Who told you that?” he mumbles. His usual vocal response.
I can tell he’s genuinely surprised, but he hasn’t answered my question. I persist, “Is sh-sh-she going to die, Jack?” Besides the stuttering, my voice rises into a trembling, high-pitched tone.
Jack must sense my panic, and he somehow manages to come up with calming news.
“No,” he says, “don’t even think that way. I don’t know what you heard, but your mother is fine—much better today. She still needs the doctors to take care of her, but she’s going to be better and come back home soon.”
I’m certain Jack’s telling the truth. It’s Paulina who lied.
In this one moment, I’ve got a mix of emotions: Surprise at Jack’s niceness and how he’s talking in complete sentences, and happiness to hear that Wendy will recover. The third emotion is fury at Paulina, who clearly invented her story about Wendy.
My emotions jumble into one single, overwhelming sense of relief. I thank Jack, sign off the phone, and repeat Jack’s words to Paulina, whose expression I watch carefully as I tell her about Wendy’s positive prognosis. She seems embarrassed, but offers no explanation for her earlier tragic warnings.
The Belief in Angels Page 9