by Linda Barnes
Of course. Manuela hadn’t needed the Yellow Pages. She’d tucked one of my cards into her handbag.
I don’t keep track of my business cards. Who does? But I don’t hand them out on street corners either.
The question was who did I know who spoke Spanish and owned a spare Carlyle Detective Agency card. One answer was Paolina.
When I was a policewoman, a lady from the Big Sisters Association came to the station to make a pitch. She said there were hundreds of young girls growing up in the Boston area without successful role models, girls who could use a Big Sister. It made sense to me, the one-on-one approach. I signed up on the spot and was rewarded one month later with Paolina. Paolina’s … well, she’s just what I would have chosen for a little sister. Smart and stubborn from day one, she now alternates between sentimental and tough, weeping over teen romances and arguing with her mom.
She’s nearly eleven, and we’ve been sisters almost four years.
Paolina’s mother is Colombian; her father’s Puerto Rican. From Daddy she got her U.S. citizenship and not much else. He moved on after fathering a family of four. Marta was two months pregnant when he exited, so he doesn’t even know number five exists. Just waltzed out the door one day, leaving Paolina’s mother to cope.
Coping used to be what Marta did best. If she hadn’t taken ill—rheumatoid arthritis—the family wouldn’t be living hand-to-mouth in the Cambridge projects. No way. Marta would be deputy mayor by now, chief liaison with the Hispanic community at least. But she hasn’t got the energy anymore, only rare bursts of it when the pain releases her.
Marta keeps an ear to the ground. She hears things even when she’s bedridden.
I made an abrupt decision that caused the timid Nissan on my right to honk and screech, zipped across the B.U. Bridge, and headed to Cambridge, convinced that Marta had a hand in Manuela’s visit.
Marta and the kids live in the projects near Technology Square. Every year another high-tech high rise comes along to block out their little patch of sunshine. The project buildings aren’t bad, red brick two-story houses, four apartments apiece with cement steps and stingy porches. There’s a sad-looking playground in the center of the complex, with busted swings and climb-on animals that haven’t been painted in years. You can hardly see the gravel for the beer cans.
The basketball court looks better, except the basket rims are bent and the nets are long gone.
I made certain the car doors were locked before leaving the Toyota on a side street. I even set the Chapman lock, something I rarely do. Once, after I’d just had the damn thing installed, I set it, forgot about it, and called AAA to start my car, confirming some lout’s opinion about women drivers and embarrassing the hell out of myself. I’d have preferred chaining the car to a tree.
Five black teenage boys were flashing up and down the basketball court, hollering and high-fiving, staying home to practice their slam-dunks instead of going to school, each dreaming of a comfy berth in the NBA.
Marta’s doorbell has been out of order for weeks. I keep telling her I’ll fix it, and she keeps saying no, the superintendent’s required by law to repair it and, by God, she’ll hound him till he does. I’ve met the super, and I figure it’s his eternal laziness versus Marta’s occasional energy, with the odds in his favor. All he has to do is wait her out.
I made up my mind to bring over a few tools and fix the damn thing next time. Let her think the super did it. He probably wouldn’t mind taking the credit.
I banged on the door and yelled her name. I made quite a racket, and nobody so much as looked out a window. Places like that, with heavy daily drug traffic, you keep your windows shut and your curiosity in check.
When Marta finally answered the door, she was using her cane, which meant it was one of her bad days. She hates that cane. The building used to have a system where you could buzz somebody through the door after asking who it was on the intercom. They canned that after thieves stripped the building three times, claiming to be gas men and insurance reps. There was talk of putting in a closed-circuit TV camera, but city officials figured it would get stolen first in any heist. So now the tenants have to eyeball each doorbell pusher through the safety glass and open the door in person.
Marta lives on the second floor, and I felt a stab of guilt at forcing the limping woman down the stairs. The way I grew up, guilt is such a familiar emotion that most of the time I don’t even recognize it.
She leaned her cane against the wall and struggled with the lock.
“Carlotta,” she said, opening the door and forcing a smile. “Bienvenida. ¡Pase usted!”
She was wearing washed-out gingham, a sack-like thing tied with a belt. Marta used to be slim and pretty; now she’s wiry and tough. She used to wear makeup and flashy clothes, but lately she hasn’t made the effort.
I guess she’s given up on catching a decent daddy for the kids.
She can’t be much older than I am, but she looks it.
Her cane dropped to the floor and I bent to pick it up. The hallway smelled of urine, laced with disinfectant that hadn’t quite done the trick.
I’m never sure how much English Marta comprehends. She’s been here a long time, twelve years at least. Sometimes she seems to understand me perfectly. Other times a blank expression closes down her lively eyes, and she declares, “No entiendo,” and that’s the end of the conversation.
I helped her up the steps, murmuring encouragement and wishes that she would soon feel better. She’d only left her apartment for an instant, but she’d locked all three locks, two of which I’d installed for her. It’s that kind of building.
I held her cane while she manipulated two of them. The third popped open, as if by magic, and there was Paolina standing in the doorway.
It’s hard for me to describe her features one by one, because they seem to change with her expression. I suppose some people would say her nose is too broad. Her smile more than makes up for it. She’s fit and lean, with a boyish behind and long, long legs. No breasts yet. A couple of girls in her class are already starting to bloom.
My mother used to say, “Kleyne kinder, kopveytik; groyse kinder, hartsveytik”: “Little children, headaches; big children, heartaches.”
“Oh,” Paolina said when she saw me. “Hi.” Then she turned on her heel and stalked into the back room, the one that serves as a bedroom for her and the two youngest brothers. The older boys sleep on a lumpy mattress on the living-room floor. The sofa folds out for Marta.
“Hi,” I called after her. I’m used to far more friendly greetings from my little sister. I’m also not used to seeing her home so early on a school day.
“Why didn’t Paolina answer the bell?” I asked Marta. “Save you the trek? She sick?”
Marta shrugged and sat heavily on the one decent chair in the room. It was planted four feet in front of a color television, and I got the feeling I’d interrupted a favorite game show. I didn’t remember Marta owning a color set. I wondered if it was new.
I sat on the edge of the hide-a-bed. It hadn’t been converted back to a couch yet. The bed linens hadn’t been straightened. The boys’ pillows and blankets were piled at the foot of the mattress.
“Leave it,” Marta said, although I hadn’t made a move to tidy up. I rarely do; housework and I don’t mix. “Just leave it. I’m not the boys’ maid. You’re not the maid.”
“School let out early today?”
“Ask her,” Marta said, jerking her head toward the bedroom.
“I will.”
“I thought that’s why you came. Like the truant officer.”
“No.”
“She hasn’t been going to school. Not even to band practice. I don’t know what’s her problem—maybe the kids, maybe some teacher—but it’s eating at her, and she won’t tell me. Maybe she’ll tell you.”
“I’ll try.”
She waited, watching a fat lady embrace an utterly sincere TV game-show host who promised a chance at five hundred bucks, h
oping I’d go away. I stayed put. “But that is not why you come?” she said reluctantly.
“No.”
“Don’t sit on the sofa, the lumps’ll kill you. Pull over a kitchen chair, no?”
A woman came to me. A short woman with a thin face and nervous hands. A pointed chin, very dark eyes, wide apart. A small nose, a Hispanic woman. A scared woman. A troubled woman. Manuela Estefan. Did you send her to me?
That was what I wanted to say. But I didn’t. Marta’s devious. She thinks information is a thing to hoard and dole out very slowly and deliberately.
So I started with some chitchat about her recent trip to South America. Five weeks in Bogotá, culminating in the death of Marta’s father. I expressed my condolences, although I’d always gotten the feeling that there was no love lost between Marta and her dad. Until the trip I hadn’t realized her father was still alive. As far as I could tell, Marta had gone home in quest of an inheritance and returned no better off than before. I assumed the trip had been a failure.
In more ways than one if Paolina, who’d accompanied her, had stopped going to school.
Marta said they’d had a pleasant enough time and her aunts were well and pleased to see their sobrina, which I remembered meant “niece.”
She spoke mostly in English, with an occasional Spanish word tossed in about the fine weather and the outdoor fairs in Bogotá. The wonderful leather goods. She said that the ice cream was much better than the stuff she remembered eating as a child. Nothing about the drug wars or the bombings that got front-page coverage in the Globe.
“The woman you sent to my office yesterday left something I’d like to return,” I said, slipping it in casually between descriptions of the exotic flowers you could buy at any corner market, and so cheap too.
Marta kept describing flowers for a while, then slowly ground to a halt. “What woman?” she said, instantly suspicious. “Una mujer with no name?”
“Manuela, I think she said.”
“I don’t know any Manuela,” Marta said.
“Manuela Estefan,” I said. “I’d like to help her, but I don’t know how to find her.”
“Maybe she’ll find you,” Marta suggested, “when she wants to.”
“But maybe this woman is in trouble. Maybe if I could find her now, it would save her more trouble,” I said.
“Manuela … no. I don’t think I know a woman with that name,” Marta repeated. Her face and voice gave nothing away. She could have been a cardsharp. The most important thing in the world might have been whether or not the fat woman answered the game-show host correctly. She gave the TV her full attention.
I didn’t know whether to believe her or not.
“If you should meet such a woman, would you tell her that her green card is safe with a man at INS?”
“La Migra,” Marta said, still staring at the TV but spitting out the syllables. “What are they but trouble? Nothing is safe with them.”
“I can help Manuela get her card back, but she has to get in touch with me or with a Mr. Jamieson at INS.”
Marta considered that for a while. “I don’t know any Manuela except the woman who teaches the children at the day-care, and she has a different family name. She is fat and ugly. Yours is fat and ugly?”
I described my Manuela, but Marta kept a poker face.
“Maybe you go now and talk to my Paolina, no?” she said, hitting the remote control so the TV volume increased to a roar. “Maybe to you she listens. To me, no.”
5
Paolina’s bedroom looked like it had been tossed by thugs. The three single beds, one stretched along each yellow wall, trailed tangled sheets and blankets to the cracked linoleum floor. Underwear, sweaters, and socks were stuffed in and draped over the board-and-cinder-block shelves that substituted for bureau drawers. Nothing was folded. Nothing neatly stacked. The odor of unwashed socks filled the air.
On the plus side, no smell of marijuana.
Paolina’s room is usually pretty bad, but today it was worse. It took me a while to realize it wasn’t just the smell and the mess. The posters over Paolina’s bed were gone, leaving jagged tape marks in the paint. I couldn’t remember the missing posters, but they’d been colorful, cheery.
I opened my mouth to remark on the state of the room, took a breath, and thought better of it. Closed my mouth, opened it again, closed it. I was glad Paolina was lying on her bed with her face turned to the wall instead of watching me do my goldfish imitation. I decided not to mention the room. Who needs criticism when they’re down? Besides, my own standards of housekeeping are not such that I can hold myself up as a shining example. I don’t make my bed either. I mean, why bother? You just have to do it again the next morning.
Paolina was in the center bed, the preferred one under the lone window, hers by right as the eldest child.
I made a noise, a polite coughing sound, but she didn’t turn her head, so I shoved some junk aside and sat on one of the other beds.
“What this room needs,” I said solemnly, “is a parakeet.”
They used to put canaries down in the mines, I thought, so the fumes would kill them instead of the miners.
“Huh?” she said.
“Well,” I replied, “I had a particular bird in mind. I think Red Emma would brighten things up around here. All that chirping and stuff.”
“You tired of Esmeralda?”
“If you’re going to call her Esmeralda, she ought to live here. Whoever names the bird gets the bird.”
My parakeet—not my parakeet, I wouldn’t have a parakeet by choice—is a bird of contention. The budgie, originally named Fluffy, for God’s sake, belonged to my Aunt Bea and came with the house when I inherited it. Aunt Bea, an awe-inspiring woman in other respects, doted on that bird, and I didn’t feel right about getting rid of it. I renamed it Red Emma after a hero of mine and wished it a mercifully short life. It will probably outlive me.
Paolina likes the bird. Since it’s undoubtedly green and not red, she has taken to calling it Esmeralda. She’s teaching it Spanish.
I opened my mouth to ask her why she wasn’t in school. “So how’d you like the volleyball match?” came out instead.
“Okay,” she said, her answer muffled by a pillow.
Once, not so very long ago, she would have replayed every point of that final game with me, asking me why I did such-and-such or so-and-so. She’s a damned good volleyball player herself.
She was wearing jeans torn at the knees and a T-shirt that her school band had peddled a few years back. MAKE A JOYFUL NOISE, it read in rainbow colors, now faded, with ornamental half and quarter notes in the background. I had a few hiding in the back of my closet. Each kid had been expected to sell a dozen to make money for the band. Those Paolina couldn’t sell, I bought.
I’d even given a T-shirt to Roz, my punk-rock tenant, but it was too tame for her and I’ve, never seen her wear it.
She finally sat up and faced me, sitting cross-legged on the bed.
“So?” she said.
“¿Qué tal?” I replied.
“Nada especial,” she said. It didn’t look like “nothing special” was going on. Not with her skipping school and spending the afternoon facedown on the bed. Not answering the door when she knew damn well her mother would have to climb downstairs with her cane.
“Sábado,” I said. “I’ve got another game. You mind coming with me?”
We’ve been spending Saturday afternoons together forever. We cruise the shopping malls, check out the local music scene, go apple picking in the country. I’ve taken her to eight Red Sox games, and she really got into it last year. Broke her heart when they didn’t make the World Series after pulling off that miraculous twenty-three-game home winning streak. This year she was more cynical, like the old-time fans.
“I don’t care,” she mumbled. “Whatever you want.”
“Hey,” I said, “you can do better than that.”
“The hell I can,” she shot back.
I breathed for a minute. Paolina doesn’t talk to me like that. I have no idea how she talks to her school buddies, but she does not talk like that to me. I figured she wanted a reaction, but I wasn’t sure what kind.
I just sat there.
“So aren’t you going to ask me why I’m not in school?” she said angrily, throwing a pair of mismatched socks on the floor.
“You want to tell me?” I asked, feeling my way on unfamiliar ground.
“It doesn’t make any difference,” she said.
“What?” I said.
“Huh?”
“Telling me doesn’t make any difference, or going to school doesn’t make any difference?”
“Nothing makes any difference, that’s all,” she said, and she turned her face away so I could study her profile and think about how much older she looked than the girl I’d first met, the one not quite seven years old, with the hand-shaped bruise across her cheek.
“I’m sorry you had to stay in Bogotá so long,” I said. “It must have been tough, missing the first days of school. They probably assigned seats and everything, and you’re not near your friends—”
“Kids are dumb,” she said.
“Did something happen in Bogotá?” I asked.
“Nada,” she said. “Nada especial.”
“But you’d rather stay here than go to school? Is it a teacher?”
“You don’t understand,” she said, and her sad voice echoed in the tiny room. I could hear myself, age ten, saying the same thing to my mom: You don’t understand. You don’t understand.
“Honey,” I said, “I try, but I can’t read your mind. You have to tell me.”
“Didn’t you talk to Marta about me?” she asked bitterly.
Usually she calls Marta Mom.
“Should I?” I asked.
“No.”
“Did anything happen to you in Bogotá?”